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For a certain kind of language critic, highlighting errors of punctuation is a sport unto itself.
It is rare a week to go by without some kind of punc-mark complaint gracing my inbox.
“What has gone wrong with the ABC? Your reporters do not have even basic knowledge of the use of apostrophes,” reads one of the latest.
Like most who engage in such jeremiads, this complainant was certain that the inability to adhere to English punctuation conventions was not only newfound, but increasing each passing year.
“You are quite literally contributing to the rising rates of illiteracy within Australia,” they concluded.
A heady charge, and one tinged with presentism — people have been making it since at least the 1930s.
What do apostrophes do?
Apostrophes have a few substantial roles in written English, and a host of additional minor ones. Chief among their responsibilities are showing where letters have been omitted, as in don’t.
The apostrophe is not needed for this job, and for quite a long time did not do it.
Many contracted forms of English words are only regularly apostrophised from the 17th century onwards.
The Oxford English Dictionary attests are nt for aren’t, isnt for is not, youre for you’re, and so on.
Dont appears in the writings of William Faulkner. Shakespeare wrote youle and Ile in Much Ado About Nothing.
Another major role for the apostrophe in English is to indicate what’s commonly called the possessive case. You recall the schoolyard rules: teacher’s pen, the people’s case, Morrison’s call, but Suetonius’ Lives and politicians’ interests.
Again: the apostrophe doesn’t need to do this in English, and for a long time it didn’t.
After pilfering the mark from French typesetters in the 16th century, nobody was quite sure exactly where to put it.
Even usage mavens had a hard time: in a survey of language criticism across the 17th–19th centuries, Bloomfield and McKnight noted possessive constructions without the apostrophe (in her Maiesties Courte) were relatively commonplace.
So too were genitive pronominal constructions. Bishop Lowth — whose grammar advanced that zombie rule not to end sentences with a preposition — wrote your’s, her’s and our’s.
(Oddly, this is somewhat resurgent practice among the extremely online of Twitter, who might humorously allude to reading many post’s.)
Even after conventions were standardised towards the end of the 19th century, the mark still seems to vex.
(You can deduce this confusion from its negative: in the four major revisions made to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style in the last 50 years, nobody’s seen fit to move apostrophes for possession from the first page.)
For these reasons and more, experts in English have been happy to see the back of this troublesome squiggle.
Robert Burchfield, one of the 20th century’s most distinguished lexicographers, said in 1985 that the incorrect use of this “moderately useful device” was evidence enough for its abandonment.
The playwright George Bernard Shaw dispensed with them entirely, referring to them as “uncouth bacilli”. Not unreasonably, he also questioned why we write shan’t and not sha’n’t.
In the introduction to its section in the Penguin Guide to Punctuation, the linguist RL Trask referred to the raised comma as “the most troublesome punctuation mark in English, and perhaps the least useful”.
If we did get rid of apostrophes, we likely wouldn’t need to replace them with anything.
“Genuine ambiguities caused by omission or misuse of the apostrophe are very infrequent indeed,” said David Denison, editor of the Cambridge History of the English Language, in a mid-’90s treatise on English syntax.
Geoffrey Pullum, the grammarian and one-time organist for Geno Washington’s Ram Jam Band, has previously stated for the Chronicle of Higher Education that “the level of harmful confusion attendant on dropping all apostrophes from written English would be zero”.
Going, going… gone?
The campaign to rid English of apostrophes has already succeeded, at least in some contexts. Don’t believe me? Check a map.
Placenames in Australia (and elsewhere) shirk the possessive apostrophe: the Flinders Ranges, Frenchs Forest, Chinamans Beach.
This practice, incorrectly attributed to texting millennials, has its origins in the mid-1960s, when the Geographical Names Board of NSW introduced it in an effort to ensure consistency and ease of retrieval for emergency service databases.
A similar apostrophic absence is underway in the names of organisations, where we have Melbourne Writers Festival but Sydney Writers’ Festival, Brisbane Magistrates Court but Melbourne Magistrates’ Court.
By now, it’s time to ask an operative question: who cares? Lots of people, apparently.
Lynne Truss was able to sell about 3 million books lamenting the “stupidity and ignorance” of people who’d allegedly flubbed their apostrophes, among them greengrocers and the pop group Hear’Say. (Only in matters of language is “zero tolerance” configured as a virtue.)
The unimaginative nature of all this is striking. If the rules have been in flux for centuries, and are more often than not observed in the breach, why is our collective solution to double down on the rules?
As the linguist Anne Curzan has noted, punctuation runs second only to spelling as the most successfully standardised component of English.
In this view the apostrophe, like some typographical Goldman Sachs, is simply too big to fail.
Whatever happened to the spirit of reform? Harry Lindgren, quixotic architect of Narrabundah’s Spelling Action Society, spent much of the early 90s imploring the Canberra Times to uniformly represent the /e/ vowel sound with the letter [e]: alredy, deth, ses.
It’s not like other languages haven’t enacted a bit of top-down change, either: Germany altered its orthography quite significantly in 1996. In the main, people just got on with it.
Last year, when a self-styled “grammar vigilante” told the BBC he spent his nights correcting apostrophes on shopfront signs, public reaction was torrential and he inspired imitators as far abroad as Whanganui.
That Bristol-based sign defacer, pressed to explain why he dressed up at night and painted over the apostrophe in Cambridge Motor’s, said misused apostrophes on signs “weren’t setting a good example for society”.
As an answer, it neatly demonstrates how intertwined notions of standard English and morality have become. More telling, in my view, was his later remark: that correcting apostrophes makes him “feel good”.
It’s hardly worth sanctioning property damage just so people can feel superior. Lets get rid of the apostrophe.
Tiger Webb is a researcher with ABC Language.
A version of this article containing no apostrophes is available upon request.
Topics: english, arts-and-entertainment, human-interest, australia
