When theyre gone, well all be struggling with English
Birmingham city councillors, trendy teachers and modern grammarians want to abolish the apostrophe but, says William Langley, proper punctuation should not be sentenced to death.
The problem child of English grammar is a tiny, tadpole-shaped bundle of trouble that makes no sound, but spells chaos. Three centuries after it invaded our language (almost certainly sneaked in by the French), the apostrophe continues to defeat, confuse and humiliate large numbers of people, and, in retaliation, they want to abolish it.
Then we wont have to worry about where its supposed to go.
Last week Birmingham city council announced that it would no longer use apostrophes on street signs . Councillor Martin Mullaney, the Liberal Democrat chairman of its transport scrutiny committee, claimed that dropping them would make the city's signage policy "more consistent", and easier for users of computer databases and satellite navigation systems. Apparently, if you have the misfortune to be a Mr O'Dowd, needing a minicab from the King's Arms in D'Arcy Avenue, drivers can't find you.
So, St Paul's Square, an elegant, late-Georgian landmark in Jewellery Quarter, will become St Pauls Square. We'll have the fashionably de-apostrophised Druids Heath and Acocks Green, but things are unlikely to stop there. Once they start to slide they slide quickly, and it surely won't be long before Great Charles Street, in the shopping district, becomes GR8 Chas St.
It is tempting to blame all this on the march of the knuckle-dragging illiterates who populate the lower ranks of officialdom, commerce and much else, but a substantial part of the responsibility lies elsewhere. Particularly with the fashionable clique of modern grammarians which has the apostrophe in its sights. Prominent among this bunch are the likes of John Wells, emeritus professor of phonetics at University College London, who argues that strict rules of spelling and grammar "hold children back", and the linguist Kate Burridge, author of Weeds in the Garden of Words, who wants the possessive apostrophe scrapped. Prof Wells wants to replace the apostrophe with a blank space, and when Ms Burridge argued at a public meeting that it should be dropped, she was loudly booed and told that she said "you know" too much to be taken seriously. She is now engaged on a campaign to have the "Yeah-but-no-but" catchphrase of Little Britain dimwit Vicky Pollard entered into the Oxford English Dictionary.
The apostrophe, then, is not entirely friendless. John Richards, a retired newspaper sub-editor and founder of the Apostrophe Preservation Society, based in Boston, Lincolnshire, believes that most of us are fond of it, and struggle with its complexities only because we are set a poor example. Think, he says, of Barclays Bank, Butlins holiday camps and all those ladies wear departments in the stores. And now Birmingham is abandoning the fight. "They are taking the dumbing-down route, setting a terrible example, and letting down everyone who tries to teach proper grammar and punctuation," he says. "How difficult is it, really, to use an apostrophe?"
Sadly, on the current evidence, too difficult. The misuse of the apostrophe has spread everywhere, including into our classrooms. A recent survey of teachers found that almost half were unable to place one accurately in the sentence: "The Smiths' house is a disused windmill." Two thirds wrongly inserted one into: "The 70s was a great decade for music."
Why so hard? The apostrophe only has two real functions. In contracted verbs and pronouns it indicates something left out. as in "aren't" or "he'll". It also forms singular and plural possessives – eg "king's" or "kings'". Compared with some of the orthographical horrors lurking within the English language it should be a piece of cake, yet even the best-read and brightest can fail, or, at least refuse, to grasp it. George Bernard Shaw denounced apostrophes as "uncouth bacilli", and conspicuously ignored them. The critic C C Barfoot called their use "the single most unstable feature of written English". The antagonism continues to grow.
And so, towards its death bed, the apostrophe has slipped – hastened on its way by trendy teaching, the proliferation of punctuation-free emailing and the seemingly unstoppable spread of hand-scrawled signs in the High Street that say "Best Carrot's" or "Todays Special".
Yet the advantages of proper usage are all-too obvious. Consider two examples offered by Britain's leading apostle of the apostrophe, Lynne Truss: "Those smelly things are my brothers." Now drop in the apostrophe and you get a different meaning: "Those smelly things are my brother's." Or this: "The dog's like my dad." Without the apostrophe it becomes more agreeable: "The dogs like my dad."
Unlike the determinedly purist French, the British have no equivalent of the Académie Française to defend their language. No government body – certainly not the Estuary-spouting Tessa Jowell's absurd Ministry of Culture Media and Sport – stands up for the endangered glories of the English tongue. The best we have are the likes of Ms Truss, author of the hit grammar book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and the BBC's John Humphrys, who believes text messaging is "doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago… destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary."
To fight back, we have to understand how the apostrophe became a feature – albeit a late one – of written English, and why it still has a role to play. Its roots lie in ancient Greece where the oratorical tradition included a device known as apostrophein, which literally meant "to turn away" but which, in practice, described the moment at which a speaker would turn from the audience to address people or things unseen. The word came to express the idea of something missing.
By the late Middle Ages it was appearing as "a floating comma" in books of Italian verse, and arrived in Britain, most probably from France, in the 16th century. Authors found it useful for forming elisions, and so making clear how a word was pronounced. Thus kiss'd would show that the word kissed had one syllable rather than two.
Confusion started when the apostrophe became an indicator of possession. Even educated scholars, according to Lynne Truss, struggled with "geniuses" and "genius's", and, particularly, the treatment of historic plurals such as "women" and "children". Slowly, the apostrophe gained a reputation for being awkward.
"But it isn't really," insists Richards. "It just needs to be understood, and treated with respect. I first started this society in despair at the number of mistakes I saw. I thought what a shame it was that something so useful was treated so badly." He began writing polite letters to proprietors of places such as "The Modern Mans Barbers Shop", and while not everyone took the advice kindly, his campaign made news around the English-speaking world. He was deluged with messages of support. "I've heard of people carrying felt pens and rolls of sticky tape around to correct mistakes," he says. "They are very attached to their apostrophes."
So they should be. In an age of falling standards, apostrophes stand as a line
of defence. And when theyre gone, theyre gone.
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