Recently spotted in my MD’s artwork presentation to a potential client:

Single Breasted Womens Jackets

Admittedly, fashion marketing isn’t my area of expertise but I wouldn’t have thought there are enough single breasted women to create the demand for such an item. In addition there is a possessive apostrophe missing (grrrr).

Note: The plural of woman is “women”. There is no plural of women so “womens” is never a word.

Technically, the header should have read:

Single-breasted, Women’s Jackets

I resisted the urge to suggest that it should be changed, partly because I don’t want to appear anal and smug (unlike certain other GrammarBloggers) and partly because I suspected I would be overruled in the name of style.

The layout for this presentation was clean and uncluttered and the header would have admittedly lost some of its stylistic value if it had been interrupted with all that pesky punctuation.

So does that mean the laws of punctuation can be ignored in this case? Not under my hard-line dictatorship, that’s for damn sure! Any arty types dropping apostrophes willy-nilly had better be prepared for the thumbscrews.

Leniency will be shown with regards to hyphens, they can be optional.