Arthur and Colin sat opposite one another, as they always did. Their wives brought in a pot of tea and fresh sandwiches on trays. Dennis sat, patiently, with a clipboard on his lap. It was Dennis’s living room. The curtains were drawn and a free-standing lamp glowed in the corner.Dennis found the tea ritual irritating. It seemed to take longer than necessary. With both Gladys and Maeve sharing the responsibility, arms would become crossed and milk was bound to be spilt.

‘Tea, Dennis?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Milk and sugar?’

Dennis took his tea with milk and two spoonsful of sugar. He always had. Gladys knew it, too, but it was all part of the ceremony. He waited for everyone to settle with their cups and saucers and biscuits and began.

‘Right,’ he said, looking down at the notes on his lap. ‘Shall I read the minutes from the last meeting?’

‘Oh, Dennis,’ said Colin, spitting a crumb, ‘I am sure we can all remember. I don’t think there is any need to plough over it again.’

Dennis had always suspected Colin’s heart was not quite in their cause.

However, he took their work seriously. There was a round of ‘Here, heres’ from the others, so he replaced his glasses and continued to speak. ‘Then I propose we move straight to point one.’

Colin rolled his eyes and slurped his tea.

‘Is there something wrong with your tea, Colin?’ asked Dennis. ‘Is it too hot? Because if it is maybe you could add a drop more milk?’

‘No, thank you, old chap, I am quite fine as I am.’

‘No Delia tonight then, Dennis?’

Delia was Dennis’s new ‘companion’. (He refused to refer to her as a girlfriend.) He met her at the local Conservative club a month before. They organised the raffle together. When their fingers touched as she handed him her used ticket stubs he had felt a tingle. Of course, he would not admit as much – not even under torture. She was a ‘good, sound woman’, and that was all he had to say on her.

‘No. She is visiting her mother in Plymouth.’

‘That’s a lovely part of the world,’ cooed Gladys.

‘I took you there for our first wedding anniversary,’ added Colin. ‘Do you remember, dear?’

Gladys placed her tea on the coffee table and clapped her hands together.

‘Oh, yes. And do you remember the couple who owned the bed and breakfast we stayed at?’

‘Mr. and Mrs. Groves,’ said Colin after a moment’s recall.

‘That’s right. Mr. and Mrs. Groves. Do you think they’re still there?’

Colin looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think so, dear. Not unless they’re a hundred and-twenty-years old. I’ll check the Guinness Book of Records under “Longest living hotel proprietors” when we get home.’

‘The first item on the agenda,’ continued Dennis, speaking over the interruption, ‘is the lack of reply from Sainsbury’s to our letter dated the fourteenth of last month. I propose -’

Dennis was pulled up short by a sound, not unlike a clap of thunder, in the hallway.

‘What was that?’ asked Arthur.

There then followed the sound of muttering.

‘It sounds like there’s someone there,’ whispered Gladys.

They all turned their attentions to the door. A tall man, wearing a white toga and looking lost, walked past toward the kitchen. He stopped, abruptly, as though spotting them out of the corner of his eye, and ducked beneath the frame. His stature was certainly impressive. His hair was gold in colour and loosely curled down to his shelf-like shoulders. On his feet he wore sandals and in his hand he carried a bright green staff. It was tightly zig-zagged, like the serrated edge of a saw and appeared to be emitting a gentle light. It reminded Colin of the green line that appeared below grammatical errors on his word processor.

The intruder spoke in a firm voice. ‘I am Apostrophes.’

He was met with blank looks.

‘I am the god of grammar.’

The meeting exchanged shrugs. Dennis looked down at his clipboard as if he expected to find help there.

‘We’ve never heard of you,’ said Colin, somewhat irreverently.

‘Why does that not surprise me?’ replied the god, bitterly.

There was an embarrassed silence. It was broken by Dennis. He decided, as chairman, it was up to him to call the meeting to order. He stood and cleared his throat. ‘If it's money you want, we are not rich, but-’

Apostrophes looked up – his eyes glass-like with rage. He raised his staff over his shoulder in the classic spear-throwing pose, and threw it at Dennis. There was a crack of electricity and Dennis slumped in his chair – a wisp of smoke rising from a patch of charred pullover on his chest. At the speed of thought, the staff reappeared in its owner’s hand. Gladys and Colin leapt across the coffee table. He tried rousing Dennis by slapping his face, while she stroked the palm of his hand.

‘Is he dead?’ asked Arthur, urgently.

‘Dead?’ Apostrophes took offence. ‘He is not dead; he is merely stunned.’ He pointed to the stricken Dennis. ‘See how he moves.’

Dennis murmured and his head rolled from shoulder to shoulder. Gladys marched across to the seven-feet tall god and berated him with her finger. ‘You brute! What did you do that for?’

‘He said you were not rich.’

‘So?’

'People are wealthy,' he replied, without a trace of condescension, 'chocolate cake is rich.'

'Are you mad?' squealed Gladys. 'You can't go around attacking people with your stick when they make a grammatical error!'

‘But I am Apostrophes,’ was all he could think to say, for he was genuinely ignorant of what crime he had committed. ‘And it is not a stick, it is a grammaticon.’

Gladys tutted and returned to a kneeling position beside Dennis, who was regaining consciousness. Colin, mindful of his grammar, spoke carefully. ‘What do you want?’

‘Want?’ Apostrophes was wistful. ‘What I want is for people to speak and write correctly. Language is the most powerful tool humankind possesses, yet it continues to blunt it through laziness.’

‘What is it you want with us?’ asked Maeve, who not only had regained her voice, but was beginning to find the god attractive.

‘Is this not a gathering of the Apostrophe Protection Society?’

‘Cambridge branch,’ said Dennis weakly. He was hushed by Gladys and told to relax.

‘Then you will follow me.’

‘Follow you where?’

‘To wherever I lead.’

‘I hope you’re getting all this down, Arthur’ asked Colin. ‘It’s your turn to take the minutes.’

Dennis sat up and prodded his wound, which was slight but still warm. However, Apostrophes was in mid-lament. ‘For centuries I have witnessed the evolution of language, he said as he paced the room. ‘Now I preside over its decay.’ He stopped and became lost inside his own mind. ‘The last decade has proved a particularly trying time for me.’

A thought formed in Colin’s mind and he used this pause to air it. ‘If the language is on its knees, shouldn’t you be weak or even dying?’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Well, it strikes me that a god is only as strong as those who believe in him. If a belief is forgotten, so is the god. If grammar is dead then it follows you should be, too.’

Apostrophes appeared to collapse in on himself. His shoulders rounded and his head dropped. ‘If only it were so.’ His voice, though still imposing, was hollow. He sat down on the armchair vacated by Gladys and rested his grammaticon between his knees. ‘Many gods have died this way. It is true. However, for as long as there is language there will be grammar, and I will not die. I will just go on feeling the pain of its misuse.’ His voice trailed off: ‘For me, there will be no release.’

Maeve took this opportunity to rest her hands on his knees. ‘How about a nice cup of tea?’

Apostrophes lifted his head. ‘What is tea?’

‘It’s a drink. It’s made from leaves.’

Apostrophes was uncertain. ‘Does this tea give respite?’

‘Oh, yes, it is very relaxing.’

She went to the kitchen and returned with a clean cup, which she filled from the pot. ‘Milk and sugar?’

Apostrophes shrugged, sorrowfully. Maeve smiled and added milk. She handed it to him. ‘Careful,’ she warned, ‘it’s hot.’

He sniffed the tea, suspiciously, and placed it to his lips. His face curled in disgust and he sprayed it from his lips. ‘It is poison!’

Maeve dropped two spoonsful of sugar into the cup, stirred it, briskly, and handed it back. ‘Try now.’

He swallowed the sweetened tea and his face became a picture of delight.

‘It is exquisite.’ He drained the cup in one guzzle and asked for another. Maeve obliged, but suggested he would enjoy the experience more if he drank slowly. This he did.

‘From where can this nepenthe be obtained?’ he asked when he had finished.

‘The shop on the corner,’ said Dennis, who had recovered sufficiently to wonder at the seven-foot god who was pinching a china tea cup between finger and thumb in his living room.

‘The Shop on the Corner.’ Apostrophes mouthed the words as though repeating the location of a legendary lost city. ‘Tell me, is this Shop on the Corner well-guarded?’

‘There’s a mirror on the wall,’ replied Dennis, helpfully, after a moment’s consideration.

Apostrophes appeared to make a mental note and started on his third cup.

‘Tell me,’ he said, while, thoughtfully, dunking a chocolate Bourbon, ‘for what purpose do you meet at this place?’

‘We don’t always meet here,’ said Gladys. ‘Last month the meeting was held at my house. This month we're at Dennis’s.’

Dennis took the baton of the conversation at the mention of his name. ‘I think you’ll quite appreciate what we do here. The apostrophe has fallen into misuse. We run campaigns. Take this for instance.’ He held up a poster. ‘The local supermarket writes ‘100’s of price cuts!’ but the apostrophe, in this instance, is superfluous.

Apostrophes nodded, gravely. ‘In what form are these campaigns executed?’

‘We write letters.’

‘Letters?’

‘Yes. We make petitions, too. The most recent had more than forty signatures.’

‘Letters and petitions.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘And what success are you able to report?’

‘The supermarket manager said that if we could come up with the hundred-and-fifty thousand pounds needed to print the signs again, he’ll have them changed.’

‘How much have you raised so far?’

Dennis looked, pleadingly, to Colin. Colin reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a brown envelope. He opened it upside down on the coffee table and shook it. Some brown notes fluttered down and several coins landed, noisily. He poked through them with a finger, counting silently. ‘Forty-three pounds and sixteen pence.’

‘But we haven’t held the whip this evening,’ offered Dennis in their defence.

‘I forgot my purse,’ said Gladys. ‘Can I pop round tomorrow morning on my ways to see the doctor?’

Apostrophes, out of patience, came to a decision. He stood, wiped crumbs from his hands and lap and found his posture. ‘Are there others like you?’

‘Yes,’ said Dennis. ‘There are groups all over the country.’

‘Gather them together. One week from today. Their god requires an army.’

Gladys was not optimistic. ‘I don’t think very many people will turn up.’

He fixed his eyes on hers. ‘They will come,’ he said in such a tone that she was left in no doubt that they would.

The god gripped his grammaticon, raised it above his head, and drove it down on the floor by his feet. There was a ripping sound as it tore the air. He disappeared inside the fissure, and was gone. Arthur continued to write frantically in his notebook. When he finished he looked up. ‘How do you spell “Nepenthe”?’

The following morning, Dennis woke early. On noting Apostrophes had used all his milk the night before he put on a jacket and went out in his slippers. As he approached the Shop on the Corner he could see a police car parked outside. The shopkeeper, named Dilip, but known to all in the neighbourhood as Derek, was giving a statement to a police officer. The shop had clearly burnt down. The front window had shattered – spilling charred classified ads on the pavement – and the once white frame was black and broken. Dennis fought his way to the front of a crowd of mothers, who had stopped on the way to taking their children to school for a good look. ‘What happened, Derek?’ he asked when Dilip had finished talking to the officer.

‘Terrible business. Why? What have I ever done to anybody?’ he wailed.

‘Slow down. Are you trying to tell me this was arson? Who did it? Do you know?’

‘A very odd-looking fellow came into the shop yesterday evening, dressed in a white sheet. He asks me where I keep my tea. I tell him. He went over and picked up as many boxes as he could and he started to walk out with them.’

Dennis could feel his face flushing of colour. ‘What happened then?’ he asked, as casually as he could.

‘Well, I tried to stop him. He became angry. He told me he was some sort of god. I said I didn’t care so he dropped all the tea and started shooting my stock with a green stick of some kind-’

‘Grammaticon,’ interrupted Dennis, with an absent mind.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Carry on.’

‘There was fire,’ continued Dilip, waving his arms around above his head to illustrate, ‘and I had to run upstairs to get my wife and kids.’

‘Were they all right?’

‘Yes, yes. But when I came back down he had gone and the shop was half destroyed.’ He sat down on the kerb and buried his head in his hands. ‘This is terrible. So terrible. I will lose half my customers.’

Dennis patted Dilip on the back, manfully, and told him to keep a stiff upper lip. Dilip’s stiff upper lip quivered, considerably, when Dennis asked him where he could buy a pint of milk nearby, but was able to point his former customer to the supermarket on the high street.

A week to the day since Apostrophes’ first appearance in Dennis’s living room, the five members of the Apostrophes Protection Society – Cambridge branch – stood at the side of the stage of the local playhouse. Hiring the venue had been expensive, but necessary, when more than a thousand people accepted their invitation to attend. One couple, originally from Felixstowe, made the trip from Belgium especially.

‘Where is he?’ demanded Dennis, as he looked at his watch.

‘There are still twenty minutes,’ assured Gladys. Colin fixed Dennis with a mischievous grin. ‘Why don’t you go out there and tell a couple of jokes?’

Dennis ignored him and poked his head round the side. ‘The place is full. There are even people standing at the back.’

There then followed a muffled thunder clap. The door to a cupboard full of props swung open and Apostrophes stepped out, fanning smoke from his face. His anger at yet another botched entrance turned to embarrassment when he realised it had been witnessed by quite so many people.

‘You haven’t quite got the hang of that grammaticon thing of yours, have you?’ said Colin and was immediately made to wither under Gladys’s stare.

Apostrophes deflected this slight with a cold stare then stretched his body to its full height. ‘Were my instructions carried out to the letter?’

‘Yes, they were,’ confirmed Dennis. ‘Everyone came, as you said they would.’

‘Splendid,’ he said and looked about him. ‘Now, is there tea?’

‘In the kitchen,’ said Maeve. ‘We switched the urn on especially.’

Apostrophes was mortified. ‘It is not a Roman urn, I hope?’

‘Oh, no,’ grinned Colin. ‘It’s definitely a Greek one.’

‘Colin!’ scolded Gladys, and she slapped his arm.

‘I’ll show you where it is,’ said Maeve. She wrapped her hand round one of his fingers and lead him away.

Apostrophes finished three cups of tea in quick succession, and placed the cup under the nozzle for a fourth, when Maeve stopped him by gently resting her hand on his. He watched her cross the floor and lock the door. He then watched her stalk back. She stopped her knee between his bare legs and took a firm grip of his waist.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘We still have ten minutes. That is plenty of time.’

‘Plenty of time for what?’

Maeve loosened the rope that bound his toga and pulled it open, like a curtain. ‘This.’

He looked down upon her sceptically. ‘I am more used to goddesses,’ warned the semi-naked god. ‘I fear you will not succeed, as a human woman, in arousing me.’

Maeve bit his expansive chest and stuck her nails into his back, before dropping to her knees. Apostrophes averted his gaze to the ceiling out of common courtesy, rather than ecstasy. She returned to her feet, a minute later, red-faced and frustrated. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you find me attractive?’

‘As I have told you, you are a human woman and, for that reason, limited. I do apologise if I have given you offence.’

Maeve had one more card to play. ‘How about I talk dirty to you?’

‘I fail to see how that will – ’

‘Give me an example of an adverb of duration.’

Apostrophes’ mouth dropped open. ‘How much?’

‘Correct!’ said Maeve in a perfect school-mistress accent. ‘Give me an example of a copula!’

He took a fistful of her hair and glared, deeply, into her. ‘The verb “to be”.’

She grinned, wickedly, and started unbuttoning her blouse, starting from the top. ‘In the sentence: “We shall be staying for the foreseeable future”, name the prepositional compliment.’

‘The foreseeable future,’ he panted. ‘More!’

‘Give me an example of a phrase that contains a subordinate conjunction.’

He thought for a moment and stuttered. ‘Because . . . because I do not wish to,’ he boomed and laid her across a table. ‘Don’t stop,’ he demanded and kissed her, frantically.

‘What is a matrix clause?’

‘A subordinate clause,’ replied the god, barely able to get the words out, ‘contained within a clause!’

Apostrophes picked Maeve up and lowered her onto a table and set about ravishing her in that way of gods for whom the words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are alien.

‘Loan shift!’

Apostrophes paused in his amation to think. ‘A shift in the meaning of a word to accommodate a foreign language or concept!’ he recited and dived back onto Maeve’s prostrate and dishevelled body.

‘My God!’ cried Maeve.

‘What?’ asked Apostrophes, raising his head from between her thighs.

‘No, not you! And don’t stop!’

Apostrophes returned to the business in hand.

‘What,’ asked Maeve, her voice considerably strained, ‘is an empty morph?’

‘A part of a word,’ he shouted to make himself heard from inside her skirt, ‘that is required to make that word more easy to pronounce but which contributes nothing to that word’s meaning!’

Meave pinned Apostrophes to the tiles floor with a single gymnastic move and went for the kill.

‘Dual!’

‘A grammatical form that denotes a pair!’

'Labile verb!’

‘A verb that can be either –’

‘Either . . . either what?’

‘Transitive or, oh my!’

‘Or?’

‘Intransitive!’

‘Correct!’

They never did get to the meaning of the grammatical term ‘pied-piping’.

Thirty seconds before the god was due to address his ‘army’ he and Maeve hurried back from the kitchen. He was a model of deitic composure, while she was still twisting her skirt to fit and making sure her blouse was buttoned back up.

‘How many did he have?’ asked a clueless Dennis.

‘Three,’ said Apostrophes, innocently.

‘Blimey!’ pointed Colin, ‘no wonder she looks shagged out!’

Apostrophes didn’t understand and Dennis, too, failed to make the connection. So, for that matter, did Arthur, who wanted to know why his wife had not brought him back a cup.

Dennis revealed his watch below his cuff. ‘It’s time.’

Apostrophes gripped his grammaticon, willfully, and raised it above his head. He was stopped by Maeve, who smiled maternally. ‘Better not risk it.’

Apostrophes conceded and strode out across the creaking boards to the lectern. The assembled crowd fell silent. He waited an effective five seconds for the silence to become total and cleared his throat. ‘Warriors,’ he began and raised his hands above his head in a glorious ‘V’, his grammaticon gleaming under the lights.

‘This is an historic moment. Today we reclaim Language!’ The triumphant inflection made the following stunned silence excruciating. He opened his eyes and cast it across the audience. They were mostly wearing cardigans. One woman in the front row, he noticed, was knitting.

He tried once more. ‘Fellow custodians of Language. Keepers of Grammar. We have suffered long enough! The battle will be bloody. Many of you shall not survive to see our day of victory. Your glorious deaths will pass into legend. Who is with me?’

There was a cough from the back.

‘Who is with me?’ he repeated in a louder and more desperate tone. He lowered his arms and reached into his toga for a prepared speech, which he folded out on the lectern. In a quiet voice he began to read. ‘Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .’

Colin clapped his hand over his forehead and turned his back. The speech went on: ‘Language has always been subject to change. It is a living thing, which devours and evolves. This is particularly true of English. The dawn of the communications age has seen this process accelerate. However, the natural evolution of language I spoke of a moment ago has picked up an unnatural pace since the invention of the World-Wide Web and personal computers.’ He looked up from his notes and frowned. ‘What is American English? More to the point, why are our children speaking in this foreign tongue?’ He turned the page and continued. Nowhere has Language taken more of a hammering than electronic mail - sometimes known as E-mail. In this medium, a correspondence is often reduced to a single, breathless sentence. I use the word “Sentence” advisedly, as none of the conventions of sentence building are followed. Why, even full-stops are omitted.’

After the ill-conceived start, Dennis felt the speech was going quite well.

‘So I ask you once more. Who is with me?’

Isolated applause fluttered from the stalls.

‘Who will follow me in this fight?’

The applause, though tentative, began to spread.

‘Who will gladly lay down their lives so that Language might be saved?’

The applause stopped.

‘To martyrdom!’

Dennis could not stand to see him suffer any longer. He walked out onto the stage and encouraged Apostrophes to lower his arms. He masked the microphone.

Apostrophes bent sideways and spoke below his voice. ‘I think I am losing them.’

‘No. You’ve lost them.’

‘But why? My speech was going so well, I thought.’

‘It was till you started talking about death and bloody battles.’

‘Was I not clear enough?’

‘You were perfectly clear.’

‘Yet they do not rise to meet my call?’

‘Things have changed since the last time you were here, I think.’

‘Then why did they come?’

‘I think they thought they’d be sent home to compose strongly-worded letters and to draw-up petitions.’

‘Which battles were ever won with letters and petitions?’

Dennis felt awkward in front of so many people. He removed his hand from the microphone. ‘There will be a fifteen-minute interval,’ he announced.

The sound of bodies shifting in seats and murmuring to each other mixed to form a dissatisfied hum and Dennis, with a confounded Greek god shuffling forlornly behind him, left the stage.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Apostrophes when he reached the fresh air of the alleyway, which Gladys had felt he needed. Maeve stroked the back of his hand and his head hung low. ‘I thought they wanted to defend the language.’

‘They do,’ replied Maeve, in a soothing voice, ‘but they don’t want to shed blood over it. The world isn’t like that anymore.’

He pondered this. ‘When did it lose its way?’

‘I wouldn’t know. It must have been before my time.’

Apostrophes released his hand from hers, took three, enigmatic steps away and looked at the stars. He turned to face the five members of the Apostrophe Protection Society – Cambridge branch – and asked, ‘To wilfully go into a just battle is surely the dream of every- ’

At that moment, the air became chilled and still, as if the eye of a powerful storm had positioned itself overhead. Black clouds, tinted red by the setting sun behind them, rolled forward with the look of cooling lava. A discarded crisp packet was lifted from the ground. It bobbed in the air, before escaping over a brick wall.

‘APOSTROPHES!’ A disembodied voice descended from on high and was joined, moments later, by a man. He was similar in build to Apostrophes, but his bearing was even more overpowering. The rope that bound his toga was gold, as were his sandals.

Apostrophes dropped to his knees. ‘Zeus!’

The A.P.S. – Cambridge branch – backed away to what they regarded a safe distance and watched.

‘TO WILFULLY GO?’ inquired the greatest of Greek gods.

His voice carried the weight of an industrial explosion.

‘Yes, Zeus.’ His voice, though intended as an answer, was questioning.

‘AND OF WHAT GRAMMATICAL ERROR IS "TO WILFULLY GO" AN EXAMPLE?’

Apostrophes' face crumbled when he realised what he had been guilty of.

'A split infinitive, Zeus.'

'A SPLIT INFINITIVE, ZEUS!' replied Zeus, like a Dickensian school master.

'WHAT WOULD BE A CORRECT RENDERING OF THE PHRASE?'

'To go wilfully,' said Apostrophes, weakly, examining the depths of his soul for the source of his mistake.

'TO GO WILFULLY!' repeated Zeus, triumphantly.

There was a long silence between the ancient rivals before Zeus spoke the words Apostrophes feared.

'YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS, DO YOU NOT, APOSTROPHES?'

Apostrophes looked up, terror in his eyes. ‘No. Please. It was only one error. My first. You cannot –’

‘I CAN, AND I WILL.’ He raised his hand above his head. Apostrophes cowered behind upturned palms and begged for mercy. ‘I HEREBY BANISH YOU.’ He brought his arm down like an executioner’s axe. ‘BE GONE!’

Apostrophes fought, in an undignified manner, against the inevitable. He screamed and wept till, eventually, his image evaporated. The clouds settled and heaved like a swollen ocean. The sound of a dustbin lid rattling to the ground could be heard, followed by a feline whine.

Maeve was the first who dared to speak. She screamed, ‘What did you do to him?’

Zeus spun on his heel. He regarded Maeve as a cosmetics engineer might regard a laboratory mouse. ‘I SENT HIM – A GOD WHO SUFFERS PAIN AT THE MISUSE OF LANGUAGE – TO A PLACE WHERE HE SHALL EXPERIENCE ALMOST UNENDURABLE AGONY.’

‘And where’s that?’

Zeus’ expression clearly indicated he felt the answer was obvious: ‘WHY, AMERICA, OF COURSE.’ Then, with a look toward the heavens, he vanished, leaving the A.P.S. – Cambridge Branch rather at a loss.

‘My God!’ said Dennis, finally, and slapped his forehead for the second time that evening.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘There are over a thousand people in there. We can’t just leave them.’

‘That’s very noble of you,’ said Gladys. She held his hand and looked into his eyes with admiration.

‘Yes,’ said Colin with relish. ‘He also printed his home address at the bottom of the invitations.’

Dennis walked with heavy feet to the side of the stage. The sound of the audience slow hand-clapping made him gulp. In his experience, there was no sight more ugly than an angry grammarian – particularly when it came to missing Apostrophes.

Copyright Richard Seymour 2008