U.K. bookstore chain Waterstone's has just provided Lynne Truss with the perfect, if ironic, topic for a new preface if she ever decides to publish a revised edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Waterstone's, er, Waterstones, has dropped the apostrophe from its name for "practical" reasons. James Daunt, the company's managing director, said, "Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and e-mail addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling.... It also reflects an altogether truer picture of our business today which, while created by one, is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers."
"If Sainsbury's and McDonald's can get it right, then why can't Waterstone's?" countered John Richards, chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society. "It's just plain wrong. It's grammatically incorrect.... You would really hope that a bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English."
The Daily Telegraph suggested that the change "is also a slight to the founder Tim Waterstone, who set up the company more than 30 years ago, though long ago stopped having any involvement."
photo: @WstonesOxfordSt