Professor argues the case for tolerating bad language

When Lynne Truss laid down the law on apostrophes and sloppy language in her bestseller Eats Shoots and Leaves, the nation quailed.

But for those who failed to brush up on their grammar, hope is at hand from a new book that celebrates slang and poor punctuation.

In a counter-argument to Truss's book - which sets out to preserve traditional conventions of grammar and punctuation - Kate Burridge, a linguistics professor at Australia's Monash University, calls for the apostrophe to be dropped. "When I suggested on radio that the possessive apostrophe should be dropped ... because people get it wrong so often, you would have thought a public flogging would not have been a severe enough punishment," she says.

"I received hate mail, and some letters from the apostrophe support group, though not all of them used the apostrophe correctly."

In her book Weeds in the Garden of Words, she calls for dictionaries to acknowledge new words and usages in order to stay relevant.

"Today's weeds - non-grammatical expressions and pronunciations - are often rewarding garden species if left to grow. The words that Samuel Johnson described as low usage and cant, such as novel, bamboozle and capture, are now conventional."

She believes euphemisms will deteriorate in the future, when people will be more direct about bodily functions.

Ms Burridge says Eats, Shoots and Leaves shows the passion people feel towards preserving the language.

"People can get too worried about these things. Communication is important, people are not being co-operative listeners by focusing on specific words."

For Ms Burridge, the truly evil weeds in our language are dishonest euphemisms that try to sound neutral when really they are negative, such as "friendly-fire" and "downsize". She says these words should be banished for camouflaging meaning.

- INDEPENDENT