Daily Tele’s apostrophe catastrophe
While Dr Mumbo is wary of throwing stones in a glass house he couldn’t go past this glaring typo in the Daily Telegraph’s new brand campaign.
For those wondering what is wrong, there shouldn’t be an apostrophe in the line: “You should judge a paper by it’s cover”.
Interestingly this execution was posted in the middle of the cafeteria of News Corp’s headquarters at Holt Street in Sydney, although Dr Mumbo is assured it has been fixed, just as Rupert Murdoch has flown into town on his private jet.
The signage was probably ordered by some young coordinator just starting out…but the sad thing is that it probably went through several approval processes, through multiple people up the hierarchy…
WHAT GOOD IS FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IF YOU DON’T USE IT… for furthering the interests of the rich and powerful (and, of course, News Corp) and pushing a violently right-wing agenda
Its (sic) a shame that, when you couldn’t go past it, you didn’t remove it and bring it back to mumbrella’s offices and use it as a comma. You seem to have a shortage or an aversion of/to commas. There being two missed opportunities to deploy them in this piece to make it read better. Glass houses and stone-throwing awareness get-out-of-jail card waved here, too. But I don’t get paid to write well. (I’ll leave that as possibly meaning: I get paid to write badly …)
I say cast away with your stones. There’s a different between an occasional typo in the thousands of words churned out by a news website and an error in a marketing campaign (of few words) that surely went through many approval steps before being made public.
Fair point @Jimbo.
Perhaps it’s cover for something else.
I was told an easy way to remember this years ago – “possessive its never splits”…
Almost as funny as Rupert’s visage adorning the pillars in Fairfax’s new Darling Island digs a few years ago.
There is just the slightest possibility, that the superfluous apostrophe in the general possessive, is an attempt to re-balance for the -n- so often found to be missing in the indefinite article beginning with a vowel. “A umbrella,” or “A accident,” has become very common even in news broadcasts, as has, “the apple,” “the article,” “the event.”
There is also a need to compensate for the frequently missing first -L- in words such as “vunerable,” or the first -T- in Anarctica, or sometimes the first -C- in Antartica.
The confusion between the French place name, Cannes, one of the products of arcosteel, Cans, and the lovely old township and gateway to the barrier reef in Queensland, Cairns, continues to be a hotchpotch of a range of similar sounding pronunciations.