Flights of fin de siecle fancy

Redundant apostrophes - a growing scandal

The continuing high levels of apostrophe-redundancy in this State are truly shocking, especially at the end of the most prosperous century in our history. On a single sign yesterday, I saw the phrases "opening hour's", "keep door closed at all time's" and "many thank's". There are similarly heart-rending scenes everywhere you look, yet even Irish Times letter-writers seem to have tired of the subject.

There's no question about who is to blame for the plight of modern-day apostrophes: the so-called "writer" Jame's Joyce, that's who! The redundant apostrophes of today are in most cases the direct descendants of punctuation marks thrown on the scrap-heap by Joyce's literary "revolution" of the early decades of this century. After the grammar-intensive literature of the late 1800s, many of the commas dispensed with by Joyce had no choice but to try reinventing themselve's as apostrophe's, finding employment where they could, usually in short-term, dead-end and grammatically incorrect job's.

It is now left to caring columnists like this one to create genuine opportunities, of a kind, for commas, restoring some of their original dignity, and preventing them making nuisance's of themselve's elsewhere, where they're neither wanted nor required. Sadly, there are no such opportunities for Joyce's full stops, except occasionally where a thought trails off into nothing . . .

Beer getting colder?

Everybody worries about the Greenhouse Effect, which has caused the Earth to become a degree or so warmer in the past 100 years. But nobody talks about the Arctic Effect, which has seen beer temperatures plummet over the same period by a staggering - and I use that word advisedly - 12C.

I know this statistic is true because I have a publican friend who keeps an old Guinness promotional thermometer - dating maybe from the 1950s - which identifies 15C as "just right" for serving the product. And in the sort of painstaking research that I normally go to great lengths to cover up in this column, I checked with the brewery's press office this week and learned that the "extra cold" version currently being promoted is going down throats at a tonsil-frosting 3C! This, in a climate where the national drink should be soup.

The marketing people will tell you that the trend towards colder beer is driven by competition for young lager drinkers, 72 per cent of whom when questioned thought they lived in the Sahara desert. These drinkers will only drink beer if it has been "cold-filtered", if possible from pure spring water melted (but only just) from blocks of ice hand-chiselled off underground glaciers in Lapland, and so on.

But why should older, more sensible drinkers suffer? By accident, I ordered a pint of the extra-cold Guinness (even the ordinary stuff is so cold now that when you belch there's a wind-chill factor) the other night. And while I was warming it on the pub radiator, I had a blinding insight: that the breweries were using beer drinkers for some sinister cryogenic experiment, freezing us slowly from the inside out, with a view to eventually removing certain organs and . . .

Then, some hours later, I was sober again and realised this probably wasn't true. But if anybody else out there is interested in starting a campaign for the return of room-temperature stout, contact me at this address.

Those Russians

My favourite interview of recent weeks was one in the Washington Post with Dr Praskoyva Moshentseva, formerly of the elite Central Kremlin Hospital, who among other things once operated on what she didn't know at the time was Stalin's big toe. She didn't know, because the rest of Stalin was behind a heavy curtain at the time.

The interview had added interest because, although the Soviet Union is dead and gone, there's an old familiar air of mystery at the moment surrounding the health of Russia's top man. The confusion has been reflected in the markets, which are worried that Yeltsin is seriously ill, and also worried that he may make a full recovery. Anyway, with the sort of straight face that only Russians and dead people can manage, Dr Moshentseva recalled treating Leonid Brezhnev in the 1960s after he had "fallen from a tree while hunting moose". And I swear I didn't make that up.

Pop music too sexy

Complaining about the increasing sexualisation of pop music is like complaining about the growing profit-maximising tendency of banks. Pop music has always been sexually graphic: it's just that, traditionally, the terms used were black American slang, and square white folk didn't understand them. For years, I listened to Van Morrison growling about how he needed some "back-street jelly roll" and I used to think he was talking about a Belfast delicacy, something you'd have immediately after an Ulster Fry. (Terrible thought: maybe he was!) Square? I was a cube, man! The tradition of culinary metaphors for sex is still alive in black music, but thanks to increased education, most Europeans now have an inkling that a song called "Chocolate Salty B**ls" is not just about food; although I had to pretend it was recently when it came on the radio in the hairdressers and the female hair-person sang along with it while working on my fringe.

But we shouldn't get too het up about this, not while we remember what some of the most respectable songs in the pop mainstream are about. Take Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen, for instance, in which a slavering Neil Sedaka celebrates the female subject's arrival at the age of consent. Tonight's the night/ I've waited for . . ." sings Neil. The dirty eejit!

And while extremely naff songs like If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold it Against Me don't mention specific body parts, they do make private parts of you squirm every time you hear them.

So let's just chill out on this subject. And let's also be thankful the French don't have many hit records here: remember Je t'Aime, which corrupted a generation of young English-speakers through the universal language of heavy breathing? My glasses still steam up whenever I hear that song. But it's mostly with embarrassment now.