Tesco. The Librarian’s choice of supermarket.

How’s your grammar? Can you tell when to use ‘who’ and when ‘whom’? ‘me’ and ‘I’?

Hopefully those of us working in communications are pretty comfortable  with such niceties of linguistic convention. (I stress hopefully).

But given the woeful grammatical knowledge of the average member of the British public, should we be celebrating or raising an eyebrow at Tesco’s decision to replace signage on the quick tills, from ‘ten items or less’, to ‘up to 10 items’?

Personally I’m all in favour, but I’m even more in favour of Tesco making some posiitve press out of their decision. The Campaign for Plain English are admirable if normally ineffectual busybodies, but Tesco have taken notice of complaints/suggestion which could have been dismissed out of hand, and adapted them to fit their message.

“We’re high-brow enough to understand the need for good grammar, but realistic enough to know whats important is customer clarity”. Not to mention column (and blog) inches. Everything to everyone. Just as they’d aim to be.

(I have doubtless managed countless grammatical infractions across this post. Well, I don’t care, this is a medium for self-expression… Do you like the way I got my excuses in early?!)

Alex