Teacher, leave those ads alone

It was nice to see, following the letter from Mr Finnian Fitzpatrick, the beleaguered teacher, that there are others out there who, like myself, have secretly taken on Keith Waterhouse’s former role as monitor and publicist of English use and abuse.

In this case, however, while Mr Fitzpatrick feels that it should have been Saint Whose Day, I fear that the original writer of the “Saint Who’s Day ?” headline was correct. Whose is a possessive adjective meaning of whom. The creative in this instance refers to the Day of Saint Who, where the offending word is used as a Proper Noun as in Doctor Who’s Tardis. Now that it’s fifteen all, a suggestion.

I received through the post this week a catalogue from a certain Joe Brown’s clothing company, in which the inside front cover had an introductory letter from “Joe” which was riddled with grammatical errors (I must be too old for their clobber). Why do you not set some space aside for readers to write in with examples of creative language use, spotted during the daily grind?

It might be droll (and then, it might not)! My starter for ten (not particularly amusing, this one) is from Richard West’s article on Data Resources for CRM (MW April 19) where he contrasts those companies with limited budgets with larger companies with seemingly bottomless funds. What do you think?

Doug Garner

Cheltenham