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Sometimes it’s good to know we pedants are not alone in our insistence on correct grammar. The residents of the small Minnesota town of Lindström in the US are fighting the US Government for the right to display the two unassuming little dots that should hover above the ‘o’ in their town’s name (yes, an umlaut).

The former hamlet was established in the mid-19th century by Swedish immigrants. When in 2012 the Minnesota Department of Transportation replaced the town’s welcome signs,

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You’d think words like ‘baked potato’, ‘citrusy’ and ‘crap shoot’ have been around long enough to gain official acceptance in the Oxford English Dictionary but, surprisingly, according to inbound marketing expert HubSpot, they were among words in everyday use included in the dictionary for the first time in 2014.

Other latecomers to the lexicon are perhaps more understandable, having becoming popular through the influence of social media. We’re talking here about new entrants such as ‘bestie’,

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Amusing diary piece in The Times showing what a difference a space makes: Activists were shocked by reports in the South China Morning Post that protest leaders are to jump ship. Correcting a front page story, the paper admitted it “should have said the co-founders of Occupy Central planned to turn themselves in to police – not turn themselves into police.”

One small space, a huge difference in meaning.

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