Teachers are idiots when it comes to apostrophes

Teachers' shaky grasp of grammar and punctuation has been exposed in a survey of the nation's literacy skills. Two-thirds made a basic apostrophe mistake in a test administered to more than 2,000 workers from key professions. Eight per cent even muddled the use of I and me.

Teachers made a string of blunders despite being responsible for drumming correct English into the next generation. Among other errors, teachers slipped up on the correct use of apostrophes, with many making the classic "greengrocer's" error.

Plural nouns in English do not have an apostrophe - as in "newspapers" - but the rule is often broken. Shopkeepers sometimes advertise apple's and pear's for sale, hence the term greengrocer's apostrophe.

In the punctuation test, two thirds wrongly tried to place an apostrophe before or after the "s" in the sentence "The 70s was a great decade for music". Nearly half failed to use the apostrophe correctly in "The Smiths' house is a disused windmill".

Another exercise required workers to choose the correct word in the sentence "I implied/inferred/ensued from his art collection that he was extremely wealthy".

Seven per cent wrongly picked "implied" while a similar proportion believed the answer was "ensued". Eleven per cent thought it was "none of the above" while seven per cent passed on the question altogether. Some eight per cent failed to give the correct answer to a question requiring respondents to choose between "I" and "me".

The findings prompted recruitment agency Kelly Services, which conducted the online test, to declare that teachers were not the "grammar gurus" they claimed to be. Article here.