The manager squinted in my direction.
“So… what exactly is the problem, sir?”
“The apostrophe button,” I repeated, more firmly this time.
“It’s broken?” he enquired.
“It isn’t there.”
He stared intently at the telephone, a baffled expression crawling across his face. After a few moments of careful scrutiny his eyes returned to me, nervously.
“Just to confirm, sir, when you say apostrophe you mean…?”
I sighed a little and raised my hand.
“The little flying comma thing,” I elaborated, tracing its outline in the air with my index finger. The manager relaxed a little, foolishly thinking we were now on the same wavelength.
“Ohh, you don’t need to worry about those anymore; this is the new model. Much easier to use. Just click on ‘symbols’ and it brings up a list of all the different faces…”
He’d lost me completely.
“Faces?”
“Yeah, you know… ‘emoticons’.”
As he said the last word, his thumb and outer fingers balled up while the remaining digits formed those cringe-worthy animated quotation marks, and I wondered if my earlier display had made him think all punctuation had to be acted out for greater emphasis.
He held the phone up to demonstrate. The screen contained a disjointed amalgam of brackets, commas and hyphens which – if you craned your head in the right direction and closed at least one eye – faintly resembled a set of faces.
“So you see,” he continued confidently, “there’s nothing wrong with it; they’ve just phased out the apostrophe key because the faces now come pre-assembled. You can have animated faces, audio and picture messaging–”
“Do you mean to tell me that the only way to type an apostrophe on this phone is to insert a smiley face and then delete its mouth and eyes?”
“Well,” answered the man, puzzled as to why I was so insistent about this matter, “or nose and mouth. Depends if he’s winking.”
There was a long silence.
“I’m afraid I need a phone that will let me use apostrophes for more than drawing smiley faces.”
“But…”
I gritted my teeth and dreaded the words I somehow knew were coming.
“…why else would you need one?”
*
So this is me: emissary of the downtrodden apostrophe; Grammar Nazi; pedantic prick. I’m that guy who holds you up in the queue because he feels the need to tell the checkout girl that, technically, the sign on the express lane should read ‘Ten items or fewer’. The precocious little sod who berates you for saying ‘could of’ instead of ‘could have’ or who just can’t keep it to himself when he spots a lowercase ‘i’ or a hyphen where there should clearly be a dash. My ideal job would involve travelling across continents with a red marker pen, thwarting linguistic injustice wherever it lurks, be it billboard or subtitle. I place linguistic ability above every other quality I look for in my companions, and could not even consider dating a girl who doesn’t read or can’t spell properly. And while it may seem so, it is never a masochistic decision to become hated by those around me; it’s a compulsion that has gripped me since the day I learnt to read, and has shown no sign of relinquishing its grasp ever since.
Let me tell you how it started.
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