David Crystal at Words by the Water festival, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick

Are you one of those people who gets upset if you see a sign saying Potatoe's in a shop window. Does the misuse of the apostrophe make your blood boil?

If so, you would have loved the talk by renowned linguist David Crystal at Keswick on Sunday morning.

He explained we don't get quite as bothered by misuse of vocabulary because there are more than one million words in the English language so if someone uses 'disinterested' instead of 'uninterested' we are unlikely to see it too often. Similarly grammatical mistakes do not occur regularly.

But punctuation is in everything we read so if you are a stickler then you'll constantly be groaning inwardly as a lot of punctuation depends on the way an individual - a writer, editor or printer - interprets the rules.

For example, would you put a comma after the first word in the sentence: 'Suddenly all the people left the room'. As David explained, it all depends on how an individual perceives the sentence. Grammatically there should be a comma after 'Suddenly', but it slows down the drama and urgency of what is being described.

There were lots of fascinating revelations in David's talk - Jane Austen and poet Emily Dickinson scattered their manuscripts with dashes but editors removed them; and Wordsworth was not a punctuation expert so sent off the manuscript of Lyrical Ballads to scientist Sir Humphrey Davy to add all the necessary commas and apostrophes.

There were questions from an engaged audience on 'dangling participles' and whether Shakespeare was a fan of punctuation.

David Crystal has been a linguist for decades but his passion and enthusiasm still shines through and you can tell that the enormous changes wrought on language in the past 20 years or so by the rise of the internet, emails and social media is fascinating for him.

But be warned. However much you might like want punctuation to be consistent, David said you had to be prepared for numerous anomalies in the English language and that language is contently evolving and changing.