Interesting Facts

New guidelines for school pupils in England state that only phrases starting with "what" or "how" merit an exclamation mark! (This means that children who use punctuation marks in written tests will be penalised unless they adhere to strict rules. I mean, I know I ask people not to use them in every sentence, and to stick to one, but really, this is way too prescriptive. Irk the purists!)

The possessive apostrophe is the punctuation mark that causes people in the UK the most problems. (According to a test conducted by SpinVox , nearly half of UK adults tested were unable to use it properly. The problems people have with apostrophes arise from the hopeless state of English punctuation and spelling," Professor Christopher Mulvey from the Museum of the English Language at Winchester University, told the Telegraph.)

According to Ken Munro, the managing director of SecureTest, you should never use a word that is in the dictionary for your password. (Seemingly online fraudsters have written programs that can try thousands of different passwords and try every word in the dictionary. A good password will mix letters, numbers and punctuation, but the strongest contain non-alphanumeric characters or symbols, of course not all password systems allow them, so we're stuffed.)