Keeping up with the Joneses

3:13pm Wednesday 4th June 2008

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"SIR A Bournemouth taxi driver has lost his licence because in a test he failed to use apostrophes correctly. If this trend continues, how long before not only grocers but three quarters of the population become unemployed?"

Included in the punishment, perhaps, ought to be at least one of the writers and sub-editors working on the newspaper in which this letter appeared on Monday (and its writer David A.D.Smith seems, incidentally, to have confused grocers with greengrocers).

A few weeks ago in the obituaries column of the Daily Telegraph I came across a mistake just as bad as the 'tomato's', 'sprout's' and 'green's' seen so often on market stalls and high street blackboards. No, much worse actually (and certainly much funnier), because it was so obviously supplied by a writer who thought that she/he had it right.

The subject of the piece was the Rev Robert Philp, a former Church of Scotland missionary in Kenya, who died in March, aged 95.

The obituary told a remarkable story of bravery and commitment to a cause, which is why I read the whole of it. A few paragraphs before the end came an anecdote about an elderly Kenyan woman who, as a teenager, had met "Our Roberti" at his birth. She had, the obituarist told us, been "invited to the Philpses' home by Robert's mother". My only surprise was not to see her called "Robertses' mother".

Here we had, of course, a classic instance of 'hypercorrection', which David Crystal - our greatest expert on English usage - helpfully defined for me over dinner at the end of this year's Oxford Literary Festival. This is where "a person tries to avoid making an error in the use of language but overcompensates and in so doing makes another error".

Having got as far as writing (correctly) about "the Philps", the journalist was clearly panicked into thinking that what she/he had here was a name like the Joneses.

Not this time, I'm afraid.