A typical misuse of the apostrophe conveying that the hair cuts in question possess something possibly too mystical and follicular for us mere mortals to comprehend.

This kind of sign often sees me struck motionless with rage, flecking slightly at the corners of my mouth exclaiming ‘hair cut’s what?! Hair cut’s what?!’. Thankfully this particular sign was in Soho, so I went unnoticed, or at least ignored.

Why does this matter? What good are grammar, punctuation and spelling? Surely text messages, emails and the crossover of slang into broadcast media have rendered them obsolete. Why shouldn’t we write as we er you know like speak. Well, apart from the fact that correct punctuation makes something much easier to read, giving us helpful hints when to pause and breathe; and also apart from the fact that an agreed spelling of a word helps the language to travel further and is a lot less confusing to those learning it; a knowledge of accepted grammar and punctuation gives us a much wider range of expression. Armed with the knowledge of how to express ourselves formally we can switch register to suit our needs or create an impression by ignoring these rules completely. ee cummings would have far less effect with his conscious decapitalisation of the beginning of sentences if there wasn’t an accepted punctuation to provide contrast.

There is also an argument that goes: ‘we cannot think the thoughts if we have not the language to express them’. If we constrict ourselves to a flat landscape of text speak and random punctuation, which, without meaning, would quickly fall out of use, we may lose the ability to express ourselves by paring down our range of tools. After all, that’s what grammar and punctuation are: the tools to carve our words.

A bloke called Orwell saw the long term repercussions of a restriction of expression a long time ago; he called it newspeak.