Having rightly steered us away from the dreaded greengrocer's apostrophe, she suddenly presents us with p's and q's, and the grotesque no's (rather than noes) as the plural of no. Thus in the apostrophe chapter we are told it's Mars' and Venus' for the possessive of the ancient gods, but Mars's for the planet and Venus's for the tennis player, and it's Dickens's, but Jesus'. OK, we all make mistakes, but a bigger problem is that many of Dignall's rulings are dubious, and some absurd. So barely three pages into the first chapter we find a "forego" (she means forgo) and, worse, "David Lloyd-George" (sic) is cited as an example of a hyphenated proper name. It's always tempting to point out the mistakes in such a book, so I will (it's known as Muphry's law, from which Guardian Style is not, alas, immune: "If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written").
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