OK, Neil. We'll find out if your answer gets a [thumbs up] at the end of the programme. When we talk with someone face to face, we use physical gestures like smiling, laughing or nodding to show the other person how we feel. But these gestures get lost in written communication. An infinitive verb is the form with to in the front like, “to be” or “not to be.” Some traditionalists become apoplectic when an adverb is slipped between those two words, like “to boldly go.” But Shea discovered that infinitives have been split since the thirteenth century and that the reason we have this proscription today is because some grumpy grammarians from the 1800s decided that verbs would sound more like Latin, in which it is impossible to split infinitives, if they stayed in one piece. But, Shea points out, Chaucer has split, Shakespeare has split, and not to split sometimes just sounds terrible. The controversy in Twyford began last year when a new road sign for St Mary’s Terrace appeared minus the apostrophe. The former teacher Oliver Gray expressed his discontent. And that's a big [thumbs up] from me! What about your question, Sam? Did my answer get a [thumbs up] too?

We'll be finding out more about emojis, and learning some related vocabulary, soon… but first I have a question for you, Neil. It's about the word 'emoji' itself, which was invented in 1999 in Japan for the first internet-enabled mobile phones. The name, 'emoji', comes from the combination two Japanese words, but which words? Is the word 'emoji' a combination of:

informal) people who want to have correct English spelling and grammar written online, and who criticise those who don't follow grammar rules Welcome to Grammar Police! This plugin began as a replacement for VocalDispatch but has grown into much more! According to Professor Evans, emoji users are more expressive, more effective communicators. So, could that be an advantage for someone looking for love online? That's what Michael Rosen, presenter of BBC Radio 4's, Word of Mouth, wanted to find out. Ten-codes, also known as 10-codes or ten signals, are code words used by many police officers to aid with voice communication. The codes were originally developed in 1937 to allow for brevity, clarity, and standardization of messages transmitted over radio channels. On old radio systems, channels were limited so messages needed to be short. Also, the first syllable of speech was often not transmitted, so the syllable "ten" was prefixed to all numeric codes to ensure that the important information would be received.

In these two sentences, we are not speaking of "a police". You could easily remove the word from both sentences and they would make sense semantically and grammatically. Instead, the word describes the department or chief. It gives us context. The council leader, Martin Tod, replied that while the administration’s priorities lay elsewhere, it was an issue that could lead to high emotions. When this assumed error was questioned, the answer given was that the council’s policy required that all new street name signs must omit any apostrophe formerly shown on such signage.” The 18th century saw an explosion in the publication of books about English grammar. The most influential grammarian of his day was Robert Lowth, whose 1762 Short Introduction to English Grammar went through over 40 editions before 1800. Lowth has often been held responsible for all later prescriptive rules, including the split infinitive. As Ingrid Tieken Boon van Ostade has shown, however, Lowth’s prescriptivism is less evident than has generally been assumed. He certainly had nothing to say about the split infinitive.

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Some misuses are confusing. A car repair place has the sign: “Were Open.” “Are they open or not?” ponders APS.

He said there were examples of councils bowing to pressure to restore apostrophes. Cambridge city council did this after campaigners replaced vanished apostrophes with marker pens. The government’s own aims are sometimes nakedly prescriptive. The fact that “children will be expected to understand how to use the subjunctive” was trumpeted as a key feature of the higher standards in English introduced when the revised National Curriculum was announced in 2012. This decision makes little sense given that the use of the subjunctive is rapidly dropping out of even the most formal English. Grammar obsessions In Twyford, the old sign was finally recovered and restored. Gray, the resident who had first raised concerns, was given the honour of touching up the apostrophe on the sign. “As an ex-teacher, I’m very, very interested in grammar and apostrophes in particular,” he said. Gray admitted that some people were now complaining that there shouldn’t be a full stop after the “St” in “St. Mary’s”. “I’m not getting involved in that - it’s too controversial.” The punctuation police Still, the success of Lowth’s Grammar prompted others to emulate him and brought about a surge of linguistic consciousness quite unlike anything before. Grammar books became one of the publishing phenomena of the day. The result was a circular process. He admitted the local authority had not always used punctuation “very consistently”, but added that neither had Austen, whose resting place is in the city’s cathedral. He also pointed out that there was no apostrophe in the name of Kings Worthy, another village near the city. But the Hampshire town of Bishop’s Waltham did have one.

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Emojis were invented in 1999 in Japan for the first internet-enabled mobile phones. The name, 'emoji', comes from the combination of two Japanese words, but which words? Vyv Evans describes people who don't approve of emojis as the grammar police - a slang term referring to people who want to see formal language and grammar - what they call 'correct' English - written online. The grammar police criticise modern styles of English and like to correct other people's mistakes in spelling and grammar. Still, he agreed that the St Mary’s Terrace sign was “confusing” and “not in line with residents’ wishes” – and the apostrophe should be restored. He said the idea that abolishing apostrophes helped the emergency services was “nonsense”. “Having worked in IT for many years it is absolutely standard to write algorithms that ignore punctuation and even spelling variations. I find it very difficult to believe the emergency services require precise spelling.” The word "police" is rather special: It has no singular noun form. Something like that police over there is securing the scene would be incorrect. One would always construct sentences in the plural form like so:

These miscellaneous codes may be used by various police departments to communicate more easily over the radio or in documentation. Tod said the national guidance was that new street names should not have punctuation, but he said this did not mean scrapping all punctuation in existing street names and places.

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These two poles of grammar teaching – the “descriptive” (learning to describe structure) and the “prescriptive” (learning a set of prescriptions about language) – have been evident in the teaching of grammar from the outset.