Eats shoots and leaves
My husband of many years has jetted off to Florida, to stay with his sister in Florida and celebrate Thanksgiving with her. He had stayed with our older daughter in London, on his way to the airport. And, as luck would have it, our younger daughter was visiting London too, so they all met up.
I received a text to say he had arrived safely, and was surprised to see the words he used to sign off - “very much love J”. Such a demonstration of affection surprised me. He usually says just “love J”.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, I mused. But knowing the habitual lack of punctuation in his business letters (one sentence usually lasts a whole paragraph, without commas) I looked again, more carefully, at the text.
“I enjoyed my weekend with V and L very much love J” Aaaaah!
posted by Val @ 9:10 pm
2 Comments:
Hee hee, that was funny! But it also points up the importance of correct punctuation. I read "Eats shoots and leaves" too. My hobby horse is the errant apostrophe, as in "The best in it's class". Aaargh!
Getting back to messaging, I suppose you can't expect too much with that form of communication. I sent my first SMS the other night on my son's phone (I don't own a mobile), and I don't think it's for me.
Hi, Val, (replying to the comment you left on MY blog - is there a better way to do this?)
heh heh, hadn't heard that it's called the "greengrocer's apostrophe". But what I'd like to know is why oh why are some nouns given the apostrophe and not others, in the same sentence?? To take your greengrocer model, you'll see "pumpkins, cucumbers (so far, so good), potato's"...aaargh!
I can understand how even people who know their punctuation could sometimes slip up - we are seeing so many errant apostrophes in everyday life that we are being brainwashed.
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