Correct apostrophes vital in helping Sunderland to look down on other places

One of the UK's longer running and more irritating advertising campaigns is for a brand of tea from Yorkshire, which we won't name.

It proclaims the county to be "where everything's done proper". Self-evidently the boast does not extend to grammar and, as we have recently discovered, punctuation.

The council in North Yorkshire, incidentally where the tea company is based, says it aims to "eliminate" the use of apostrophes from its signage.

In other words, their signs will be deliberately wrong and, despite mutterings about technical reasons, it's easily avoidable.

Here in Sunderland we are not immune from incorrectly omitting or adding an apostrophe - the infamous greengrocer's apostrophe as in "carrot's".

In City Hall there is signage for the "Coroners Court", "Mayors Parlour" and "Mayors Office".

These are presumably honest mistakes (yes, like the Echo's). We certainly hope so, as to do this by policy is even worse, as well as being an invitation to sneer; which North Yorkshire is discovering.

For many, the only palatable thing at McDonald's is their apostrophe. For some reason other high street biggies including Boot's, Gregg's and Vesta Tilley's (we’ve correctly printed their names here; they can thank us at the usual address) prefer to be wrong.

Is this an affectation, like the ongoing and unspeakably naff descent into the abandonment of capital letters?

We will, of course, hear the banal shriek of "Who cares?" to all of this.

However, it is impossible to explain such things to those who fail to see the point of standards. Furthermore, the question is never asked by anyone who actually knows how to punctuate.

Creating a good impression in print is always advantageous. We don't mean Magna Carta; a simple email to the bank opening with "Im writing to yooz for some loan's" will not prove effective.

There is also the issue of apostrophes changing the meaning of sentences, with defamation a potential consequence.

Still, the accusation persists that those who insist upon employing grammar, punctuation and even spelling correctly, do so to make themselves feel superior.

This is unfair. We actually are superior.

Long live snobbery and the correct use of apostrophe's...