Absolutely Plastered.


This morning I saw a van for a company called Martin Ball Plastering. I was relieved by the lack of either a comma or a hyphen.

Not all comma / hyphen use would be objectionable. ‘Martin Ball, Plastering’ would have been okay. So would ‘Martin Ball – Plastering’. You could put a hyphen between ‘Martin’ and ‘Ball’, but that would be a bit weird. At least it wouldn’t be offensive. The word-and-punctuation combo I was worried about, dare I say it, was this: ‘Martin, Ball-Plastering’.

I’m not sure what a ball-plasterer would do. Perhaps they’d specialise in souvenir scotum-casts made from plaster of Paris. If Jimi Hendrix can immortalise his intimate area, why shouldn’t you? Because it’s wrong, that’s why: even the most self-assured man doesn’t want that on their mantelpiece. Specialising in testicle moulds specifically would be niche, though you could use the result as a paperweight.

Hopefully Mr Ball is a straightforward plasterer and nothing else. Ball Plastering could be his double-barrelled surname, but I doubt it.

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