With all that’s going on in the UK—an election, Brexit, terror on London Bridge, another Donald Trump visit—it was surprising to see the British media so eager to report the death of the Apostrophe Protection Society. The Times, the Standard, the Independent, the Daily Mail, and the BBC (radio and TV) all ran stories about it, as did the Guardian (two articles on two consecutive days), together with outlets as close as Ireland and as far flung as Australia and New Zealand, not to mention the Washington Post and the New York Post.
What happened was that the society’s 96-year-old founder announced that the ignorant had won, and he, the nation’s self-appointed pedant-in-chief, no longer had the energy to campaign against the rude apostrophic errors of the ignorant. So he called it quit’s.
Even though pretty much no one had ever heard of the Apostrophe Protection Society before, the death of the APS was news. That’s because rallying in support of punctuation done right always seems like a good cause. In fact, it's mostly a waste of time.
Apparently, seeing hand-lettered signs advertising “Russet Apple’s £2 the bag” drives some people to take out a marker and remove the extraneous apostrophe. If you’re tempted to do it, don’t. You’re not Banksy, plus you could get done for vandalism.
That so-called error, "Apple’s £2," is so common that it has a name: the greengrocer’s apostrophe. It may violate some rule of apostrophizing that you learned in school, but it’s not going to stop you from buying apples.
It's not just shopkeepers who fiddle with the sacred punctuation. A few years ago, Waterstone's took the apostrophe out of their name and became Waterstones—but people still knew that it was a bookstore. And maybe also a café.
Then there’s the famous comma/no comma example: “Let’s eat, grandma” is an invitation to dine, but “Let’s eat grandma” is a joke, not an invitation to cannibalism. If you leave the comma out of "Let's eat, grandma," no one is going to call the police.
The purpose of punctuation is to clarify writing. Or in the case of “Let’s eat grandma,” to make a joke. When writing first came on the scene about 5,000 years ago, it had no punctuation; thereweren’tevenspacesbetweenthewords. Spacing, and ultimately punctuation, evolved over centuries, and the system of punctuation we use in today's English is a relative newcomer in the development of writing technology.
Bishop Robert Lowth, the author of a wildly popular 18th century grammar, a book full of do’s and don’ts, said punctuation is so imperfect that “few precise rules can be given.” When it came to where to put the commas Lowth, England's most famous grammar stickler, who boldly took a red pencil to the language of Shakespeare and Milton, threw up his hands and said that punctuation “must be left to the discretion of the writer.”
Lowth was right, punctuation is imperfect. Take the apostrophe. Today, it’s is typically a contraction of it is; its, the possessive of it, has no apostrophe. But up to the 17th century, the possessive of it was simply it. And in the 18th century, it’s could show possession. It’s used that way in the US Constitution:
No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection laws. [Article I, section 10]
Any strict constructionist will tell you that if it’s is in the Constitution as a possessive, it’s the law.
Then there’s the Second Amendment—that’s the one about the right to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment played fast and loose with punctuation: some copies of the Second Amendment sent to some of the states for ratification had a different number of commas from the official three-comma version printed by the federal government. Despite such variations, the states all ratified the same amendment. In the end, even though its meaning remains controversial, the Second Amendment means the same thing whether it has one, two, or three commas. It's meaning wouldn't change even if it had no commas at all.
It is true that observing current standard punctuation is useful in edited published writing, but even there there are variations: some writers swear by the Oxford comma, others reject it. Should punctuation go inside or outside a quotation mark? British and American editors differ on this. Then there’s the problem of where to put the apostrophe to show possession when a name ends in s. Or when that name in s is made both plural and possessive. Henry James’ novel? Henry James’s novel? Or if discussing William and Henry James together, the Jameses’ writing? The Jameses’s writing? The Jame’s’s’s’e’s’s writing? Aargh.
Fortunately, signs, shopping lists, and social media are less formal than edited, published writing, and it’s ridiculous to expect them to conform to anybody's style book. Life's too short, best to just leave them alone.
And so let us bid a fond farewell to the Apostrophe Protection Society as it sinks slowly in the west. It’s gone the way of the spelling reform boards, the committees to protect English from bad grammar, and the societies to save English from immigrants' vocabulary. Other pedants and purists will rush to fill the void, but their work is also destined to fail.
Never fear, English will muddle through despite their efforts to thwart its speakers and writers. The pedants will succeed in one thing, though: making users of English feel insecure. But until they do, Thats all folks!
