The Pedant's Apostrophe

Street signs have been the theme of the week for me.  Last night I snapped a picture of the sign that you can see here.  That simple misplaced apostrophe does not lose its power to irritate me even when it is a humble Asturian shopkeeper who has no business knowing how to place it correctly in the first place.

There is a famous Spanish knicker shop called Women'Secret in Gijón.  (It is on Calle Menéndez Valdéz, which I think of as Calle de las Bragas for the number of lingerie stores there.)  Every time I walked to work last year that sign with the misplaced apostrophe offended my pedant's eye.  What is wrong with writing Women's Secret?  If Toys R Us is a rock you stub your pedantic toe on, Women'Secret is an irritating grain of sand that gets stuck in your eye.

I should not complain.  It is also amusing to stand in the street taking photographs of shop signs.  People walk past and look at you as if you are completely crazy, especially when it is raining and dark.  It is one thing to look a little crazy and quite another to look like a pervert, however, and that is why there is no picture of Women'Secret here.

Here are two more street signs in English to enjoy.

Travelling: you really have to say it with a Spanish accent- the -ll- makes a -ly- sound and the accent then goes on the second syllable.  It comes out as travEying.

Shoespiel combines shoes- pronounced show-es in Spanish- and piel, which means skin.  So these are skin shoes, leather shoes.  At first I thought it might be Shoe Spiel with that hint of Yiddish telling you they really know their shoespeak here!