The apostrophe now has price on its head

LITTLE things please little minds and some would say I’m living proof. But they can also be lucrative for legal ones. Take the humble apostrophe. Correction: there’s nothing humble about the “flying comma” that struts about the English language, causing havoc for those unskilled in the dark art of punctuation.

Pen-pushers like me can get very irate about the improper use of this fiendish dot-with-a-tail, or its omission.

A retired journalist from Lincolnshire was so annoyed by signs like “tomato’s” and “price’s as marked” that he launched the Apostrophe Protection Society, attracting examples of similar crimes from around the world.

He finally disbanded the society after 18 years, saying “the barbarians” had won.

Now comes evidence that the apostrophe has a price on its head. Leaving it out of one word in a Facebook post could cost a real estate agent in Australia tens of thousands of pounds.

In the post, Anthony Zadravic appears to accuse his former boss, Stuart Gan, of not paying retirement funds to all his workers. Mr Zadravic insists that’s not what he meant but a judge has ruled that a defamation case against him can proceed.

The post read: “Oh Stuart Gan!! Selling multi million $ homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation. Shame on you!”

Now, if he intended this to refer (as claimed) to one worker’s superannuation, an apostrophe before the “s” in “employees” might have spared him the costly legal proceedings that followed.

But without the apostrophe, “employees superannuation” could be read to mean the entire workforce.

As the judge observed, failing to pay one employee’s superannuation might be seen as unfortunate but failing to pay some or all of them looked deliberate.

The offending post was online for just 12 hours before being deleted but the case could end up costing Mr Zadravic more than $180,000 (about £97,000). Worth remembering next time you’re tempted to fire off an angry message in a fit of pique. As one Australian journalist put it: “In terms of punctuation, social media is the Wild West.”

And you can bet there are lots of watching lawyers hoping to make a killing.

Now that my pedantry juices are flowing, I must take issue with Sir David Attenborough. As the BBC’s The Mating Game showed us extraordinary scenes of underwater lust, he assured us: “No-one has ever seen hump-back whales mating.”

Really? Perhaps it had never been reported or documented before – and certainly not seen on film or video. Not even the great Sir David can say with certainty that no-one had ever before seen such a coupling, can he?

Someone might well have done and been too embarrassed to talk about it.

I’ll sleep easy now, with that off my chest.

A retired journalist finally disbanded the society after 18 years, saying “the barbarians” had won.