There’s probably no grocers’ apostrophe

[ewx]

Unaccountably endowed with substantially more money than sense, I pay for for the following adverts to be evenly distributed across buses in the UK. Which would annoy the greatest number of people?

[Poll #1811024]

Comments

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Atheists are mostly used to theists trying to sell belief at them, theists I think are much louder and grumpier when their own methods are turned on them. Then again, they would be smugly pleased that the atheists had made themselves look stupid by forgetting the apostrophe, which would mitigate how annoyed they were by the final bus.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I vote for this. (Although I'm sympathetic to anyone shocked by the "probably no God" bus ads: they shouldn't be -- asserting your belief is covered by about 57 different human rights -- but it's inevitable that people will be, and I'm mostly glad it went as smoothly as it did.)

Although I don't think it's just a matter of what's the status quo: I think "Atlantis does exist" and "Australia doesn't exist" are equally non-mainstream, but "Australia doesn't exist" is likely to annoy people more.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Atheists may be used to it, but it doesn't stop them being annoyed by it; they may just grumble and then continue. The question was around "greatest number of people", not "greatest annoyance".

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hm. I know what you mean, but I think "annoy" has to imply some minimum threshhold (else you can say BOTH adverts will annoy EVERYONE who sees it in SOME incredibly minor way), so the question is, is an atheist's annoyance on seeing a "God exists" sign above the threshhold or not?

In fact, I'd quite _like_ to see "God exists" signs, because that agrees with me that that's the central question, rather than begging the question and jumping straight to "why are you an evil person who rejects this obvious truth?" :)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Well, I think there are more evangelical christians than there are evangelical atheists, if you'll parden the term, although my data on that is very patchy and anacdotal.

[chess]

Omitting the apostrophe in the latter might be a typographical style thing; adding an apostrophe where one never belonged is a much greater apostrophe crime, and is also the classic 'grocers' apostrophe' which famously infuriates all right-thinking people. If the question was mean to be 'apostrophe crime with atheism vs apostrophe crime with theism' it thus fails, as the apostrophe crimes are different in magnitude ;).

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

How many right-thinking people exist? 30? Maybe 35?

[twigletzone.livejournal.com]

My flatmate says he can't even look at this XD

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Show him this, then: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2478#comic

[gerald_duck]

Hypothesis: belief in a deity correlates slightly with age; caring about correct use of apostrophes correlates slightly with age.

Further hypothesis: extraordinarily few people will be annoyed by correct apostrophisation, compared with the number who'll be annoyed by incorrect. So I think the choice is between "God exist's" and "God doesnt exist". (Gosh, those are hard to type!)

Now, note that the brief is to annoy the greatest number of people, not to annoy people as much as possible. So we must choose between "God exist's" and "God doesnt exist" so as to maximise annoyance to those who are indifferent to incorrect apostrophisation. I choose "God exist's".

GOD EXIT'S

[(Anonymous)]

GOD EXIT'S