Bad Grandma

Here is a good story doing the rounds on UK based media today. I heard a snippet of it on the BBC World Service. I have added a few bits of background to the core subject.

The term “broken windows” refers to an observation made in the early 1980s by Messrs Kelling, a criminologist, and Wilson, a social scientist, that when a building window is broken and left unrepaired, the rest of the windows will soon be broken too.

An unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, they argued, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

More profoundly, they found that in environments where disorderly behaviour goes unchecked—where prostitutes visibly ply their trade or beggars accost passers-by—more serious street crime flourishes.

This theory is supported by a number of randomised experiments. Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, for example, found that people were twice as likely to steal an envelope filled with money if it was sticking out of a mailbox covered in graffiti.

What this means for law enforcement, Kelling and Wilson prescribed, is that when police officers keep streets orderly, and punish even small signs of misbehaviour with a warning or an arrest, people will behave in a more orderly way.

Perhaps in a roundabout and small way a lone vigilante in Bristol, England is contributing to achieve the same sense of order in attempting to fix broken vocabulary when it appears on public and shop signage in his home city.

We have all seen what looks like an incorrectly positioned or even an absent apostrophe on a notice or fascia.

I admit that I am quite good at spotting such things when in the car or on foot but like a good proportion of the population I do not have the confidence to offer up in that inward voice in my head what the correct grammar should be.

The anonymous Superhero, for that is what he surely is, has ventured out under cover of darkness since 2003 to tackle, head on the mistakes that signwriters and business owners get away with, either unwittingly or through downright ignorance.

The trend for bad grammar appears to be on the increase and it is easy to attribute this to a decline in the teaching of written english in schools. This may not strictly be true as I am in my sixth decade, supposedly well educated and an avid reader and yet I am still a bit hazy about the appropriate rules of where an apostrophe is required or not as the case may be.

This particular perpetrator of action for grammar has not gone into his crusade half-heartedly.

The necessary rectification does require a bit of reconnaissance and due diligence and to that end he has amassed an extensive collection of coloured sticky backed plastic and can estimate by eye the size of either a patch over a rogue apostrophe or a close matching font for the insertion of an apostrophe.

The law of the land puts these well intentioned acts into the category of criminal damage or even a technical trespass and so our brave soul has designed and made two specialised tools to assist him.

One is a set of ladders that avoids any contact with the front of a building or for example any other obstacles which might impeded his reaching the mounting position for an errant sign.

The other is an 8 foot long contraption onto which a pre-measured and cut patch or apostrophe can be placed and then manouvred and pressed onto the exact position to achieve success.

This device he calls his "apostrophiser"

His earliest rectifications were on Council Notices with incorrect Monday's to Friday's and a manicurist premises with Nail's.

He has added apostrophes to Gentlemen's outside a barber shop and removed same from Herberts Bakery and Cambridge Motors Garage.

As with the great social experiment to sort out the small issues first which has been so successful in some Stateside Cities our man in Bristol is surely doing his part to reinstate the importance of correct grammar which will percolate down through our home based social structure and surely enrich our own live's.