Everyone praised the staff of St Thomas’s Hospital during the terrorist attack. My husband of course brought his own fly to put in the ointment. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he said. ‘They were told about it years ago.’
He was not referring to medical matters but to the spelling of the hospital’s name, attached to the building in letters taller than a man as St Thomas’ Hospital. I mentioned it here in 2008. Now a reader has written to the editor of The Spectator, saying that the jumbo-sized error remains on show. It is undoubtedly wrong. Why can’t people who run a big hospital grasp the simple rules for using apostrophes?
Oxford Dictionaries says helpfully: ‘With personal names that end in —s: add an apostrophe plus s when you would naturally pronounce an extra s if you said the word out loud.’
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