Mistah Kurz - he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy!

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpieces filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat's feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.

III

This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdom.
In the last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For thine is the Kingdom

 

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper

(The Hollow Men - TS Eliot)

Apostrophes

I reckon the game is over, the campaign lost. Aberrant apostrophes are now so ubiquitous that one ceases to wonder at the expense that has gone into sign-written lorries and vans, flashing neon signs, corporate annual reports and, instead, one just waits for the first dictionary to declare this common usage and make it official. Does anyone even care that Ofsted, charged with maintaining rigorous standards in schools, sends out letters to thousands of schools where they say zero's when they mean zeroes (or zeros - OED has both) and O's when they mean Os?

Given that you could fill books with examples from people who should know better, perhaps we ought to concentrate on size. What is the BIGGEST aberrant apostrophe you have ever seen? So far, mine is a massive advertising hoarding stuck to the front facia of PC World in Swindon which read "HUGE RANGE OF PC'S IN STOCK". Send in your pics; size matters!

The reason the game is up can be illustrated by the reaction of an accountant who told me that there was nothing wrong with MP3's (as in lots of them), then accepted, reluctantly, that there was but concluded that because "MP3s" didn't look right, he would continue to insert the apostrophe

On another subject: this, courtesy of younger daughter