Santas ' grottostrophe

Spotted in Burnley town centre last Christmas.

Not in the right place. Not an apostrophe. Not even a comma.

Gifts R U'S

When I was walking along the beach in Spain one evening recently, this sign jumped right off the shop front and hit me between the eyes.

The plural of cadeau (which is the French word for gift) is cadeaux, not cadeaus.

If the plural was cadeaus (and I've written it twice now so surely you would have noticed) there would be no apostrophe between the u and the s.

The mistake of inserting an apostrophe before the s in plurals is often made in written English.

But, in French, apostrophes are only ever used to replace a missing letter. There's no such thing as an apostrophe to denote possession in that language.

I wonder what letter the shop owner thinks is missing. The x perhaps?

And why is presents not written as present's? Such inconsistency.

Finally, the shop is in Spain. Why use the French word in the first place?

English, fair enough. Many English people go on holiday to the Costa del Sol. Indeed, many live there.

But it's not as if the place is teeming with French people. After all, they have their own south coast to enjoy. If anything, the word should have been the German for gifts. There were hundreds of Germans there. So Geschenke would be my choice. That would be Geschenkes, or rather Geschenke's, in the shop owner's parlance.

OK, it's beginning to sound like a rant now so I'll stop before it gets out of hand.

But how did I notice the error in the first place?

It's a gift.

No tea for Widow Twankey

Thanks to John H for pointing this one out which he read on MailOnline last week.

An unfortunate typo was published in the Whitley Bay Playhouse Aladdin pantomime programme.

The T was missing from Widow Twankey's name.

Seems like someone at the printers decided to toss it off.

'Ave a Maria

There you were last Monday, casually browsing The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Manila website, as you do, hoping to find a link so that you could watch the installation of the city's new Archbishop, Luis Antonio Tagle.

You came across this message.

'There will be live streaming of the Rite on www.tvmaria.com and www.quiapochurch.com'

Excellent.

Well, yes, excellent if you chose the second link.

If you chose the first link, however, probably not quite so excellent...

...depending on your inclination I suppose.

But certainly not what you were expecting.

Maria's from Liverpool, by the way, in case you were wondering, and offers hardcore transgender videos and an escort service.

Manila's Catholic leadership has yet to comment on the typo mix up between the .com and .net sites.

I guess they're too busy being enthralled by the bewildering antics of a bloke parading around in infelicitous clothing.

Nah. They're probably watching Maria.

The final cross word

I'm finishing off the current series of acrostics with this article which The Guardian published in July 2011, just after the closure of The News Of The World. It features that paper's final crossword where several hidden messages and keywords were revealed once the puzzle was solved.

The article includes several links to other acrostics, some of which I've mentioned in recent posts.

So, did you spot the hidden message? As the caption says, the message they've 'left'?

No?

Well, I'm not going to spell it out.