Sam Fisher: Apostrophe catastrophes hardly a mark of failure

Apostrophe problems. Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

Opinion

Like Scrooge every Christmas we can have an experience that changes our lives.

For me it happened this week when I stormed out of a vege shop cursing the staff.

Maybe because Christmas reminds me that my bank balance and fiscal expectations are irreconcilable. At the time, however, I put the blame on our education system.

It's not "tomatoe". It's "tomato" or "tomatoes". Likewise potato. Their excuse was, "we were in a hurry". I'm pleased the vege shop owner was so excited that he raced to proclaim that he had tomatoes, but taking a minute to learn how to spell the word is surely not too much to ask.

You learn it once then that's it: it's like having sex on a bicycle; you never forget. Then you can even move on to more advanced skills, such as being polite and not saying "ay" at the end of everything. I had low expectations for NCEA, and it's reassuring to know they have been met.

I would like to pride myself on always speaking, spelling and writing correctly.

The truth is, though, I'm a failure at setting and meeting exacting standards. Ask anyone who knows me on Facebook: in the midst of passionate outbursts, out come basic errors. Sadly, maintaining a superior outraged tone doesn't last long if you regularly confuse tenses and misspell "their" as "there".

In speech I mix metaphors almost as well as John Key. One school friend regularly picks me up on possessive apostrophes or, more precisely, the lack of them.

And it was this that made me realise that in desperation I've been clinging to a few rules I do know while playing fast and loose with the rest. It's like driving - just because you know the rules doesn't mean you always follow them.

Everyone seems to disregard the signalling rules on roundabouts. Either that, or a lot of cars have gotten a warrant without having working indicators.

I've clung on to being able to correct others and snort when people say "refute" when they mean "reject". Or knowing that decimate means remove a tenth of, not mostly wipe out.

Checking Facebook, many intelligent types seem to be particularly keen on getting language rules, as if grammar has become legitimate fundamentalism for atheists.

However, protecting English is only a worthy cause if you assume language never changes. Time-travel movies fail because English changes into a different language every 200 years.

The Time Traveller's wife would be a widow very quickly if her husband appeared in the past or future speaking what to them is incomprehensible gibberish. Even today I'd have as much chance of understanding language in south-central Los Angeles as I would in Slovenia.

My Christmas moment was realising that, like King Canute, we can't hold back the tide. Tomatoe is here to stay. And this is good news. Knowing the rules allows the opportunity to amuse oneself by spotting other people's errors.

One elected representative at a meeting I attended deferred to an official, saying he was "faux pas" with the details. He probably meant au fait but I was too busy mopping up the tea I spat all over the table to find out.

Sarah-Palinisms such as "refudiate" cause horror but some of us revelled in the satisfaction of knowing she was wrong.

We should embrace the opportunity to laugh at others and roll with it, like a potatoe.