Sixty years ago I last sat in a school classroom. I completed Grade 10 high school, and that was when my parents felt I had achieved a high enough degree of academic education to prepare me for the working world. I was expected to find a job, to earn what I could, and add to my family's financial fortunes. Although my parents by then owned their own home, it was a modest one to house two adults and four children with the occasional room rental to perfect strangers. And some of them were, to be truthful, perfectly strange.

I had wanted to continue school, although I was a mediocre student at the best of times. And when I was informed that I could not anticipate returning to school it upset me terribly for I had no wish to leave the educational environment, just at a time when I felt I was beginning to at last hit my stride, I had no option but to obey my parents. I attribute my love for literature and my voracious reading habit to my informal, ongoing education from that time on.

So it strikes me as rather awry to see obvious spelling and grammatical errors commonly published in newspapers, on product labels, on signage. Canada boasts a literacy rate (basic functionality in reading and writing) of 97%, although that would surely be open to scrutiny. Canada rates 7th out of 16 peer countries in university graduation rates.

Close to 27% of working-age Canadians have a university degree, above the 16-country average, but well below the leader, Norway, which has a superior university completion rate of 35%. Norway, the United States, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia all have higher university completion rates than Canada. It's debatable from my personal experience with the use of the language whether the United States surpasses Canada's dismal record in media expression.

Which leads me to a little pet peeve of mine mentioned above; the spelling and grammar errors too often seen in the public arena. Two of my three children have university certification at the doctoral level, one has a college degree. The two who write countless scholarly, academic papers practise exquisite writing skills, while the third does on occasion slip into spelling errors that cause me to wince.

One would think that having a well-remunerated professional position in advertising or public relations would require a sound background in English, in flawless writing techniques. So I was rather taken aback when I bought a Canadian-manufactured-and-bottled shampoo (as opposed, say to the far more ubiquitous product manufactured and imported from China) and to my dismay saw an obvious and inexcusable error in spelling:

A trifling thing perhaps, but a symbol and symptomatic of gross ineptitude, inexactitude in language proficiency and an unforgivable oversight by the producers and distributors of the product, none of whom appear to be the least bit aware, oblivion being the obverse side of public relations.

The error a reflection of the inability to differentiate between the possessive and plurality.