Many thanks for the kind thoughts. Sounds a bit ominous though!

Tupu @7 … we would have a murder of crows if 15d wasn’t a pointless cock-up, if you see what I mean !

Geoff: I meant to say as a preamble – and link – that market signs are not the best way to learn a foreign language!

Monk: many thanks for the story! I have experienced the same blank stares from sixth form college students, who were often wanting to insert apostrophes in verbs, too: once we started on the apostrophe, they tended to sprinkle them around like confetti. [I have to confess to a rather similar cavalier attitude to Greek accents at University!]. I had a colleague who threatened to teach her students to abandon the apostrophe altogether, on the grounds that sins of commission were far more frequent – and worse – than sins of omission. I was often sorely tempted to take her up on it.

Geoff, re the Italian connection, I think the most annoying / amusing thing at the moment, on both counts, is ‘pannini’s’

I little thought that a remark about the correct plural of ‘euro’ would initiate a correspondence about the greengrocer’s (greengrocers’?) apostrophe!

Perhaps the original concept of the word being unchanged in the plural was following Italian practice. Italian words like ‘foto’ and ‘auto’ do not change in the plural because they are abbreviations. The full forms do change: fotografia – fotografie, automobile – automobili. ‘Euro’ is presumably an abbreviation of ‘European currency unit’, or its equivalent in other languages. ‘Ecu’ had already been used for a virtual precursor to the euro.

The details are hazy now, but some years ago (I’ll bet there’s a reader who has the reference and the exact details), Viz comic published in their (spoof) “Letters to the Editor” pages a picture of a (real, UK) shoe shop in whose window was written the caption “Slipper’s £5“. This photo elicited an entirely credible indignant letter from Mr X pointing out that “Clearly, the sign indicated that a pair of slippers in the shop were the owners of £5“. Immediately below that letter appeared (something like) the equally indignant reply “I wish to challenge the point made by Mr X (Letters Page, this issue), because clearly the location of the apostrophe reveals that only one slipper of the pair owns the £5“. At the time, my friends and I laughed heartily at this; when I recently related it to some undergraduates, they looked at me in the vein of goldfish waiting to be fed. Perhaps it’s because their App’s do it for them now …

This is straying rather off-topic (entirely my fault – sorry, Gaufrid) so if you’re going to reply, perhaps you could do so here?

I read this recently in a newsletter issued a firm of accountants: ‘Our clients range from global companies to author’s to inventor’s.’

Greengrocer’s apostrophe is everywhere these days!

Thanks for the link’s, mhl