Has the apostrophe become obsolete? Have we butchered it to the point of death? Should we omit it altogether and remove the reason for the blood-pressure spikes that come with seeing it used incorrectly so often?
That ol’ apostrophe sure does get rolled out far more than it should and is slotted in too many places it has no business being.
It is inaccurately placed so often that people seemingly have no idea when to use it and when to leave it out. So, they throw one in whenever they see an ‘s’, just in case.
I have been through patches where I corrected restaurant chalkboards and emailed websites with particularly nasty errors. But the waves of inaccuracies came so fast, I could no longer keep it up.
In 2019, the Apostrophe Protection Society in the UK disbanded, perhaps too exhausted to uncork the Liquid Paper even one more day.
The society had been created by former journalist John Richards in 2001 to preserve the punctuation mark’s correct application. But at age 96, the British man pulled the plug, saying despite his and his supporters’ best efforts, the “ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won”.
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In an era of near enough is good enough where spelling and syntax is concerned, not enough people care about the little splodge.
Australia did away with apostrophes in place names in 1966. The Geographical Names Board determined that no Australian place name should contain a possessive apostrophe, even where it seems logical. Reasons included ease of mapping and searchability.
Apostrophes forming part of an eponymous name got to keep the little black smudge, as well as places where removing it would make nonsense. So, we have Surfers Paradise (not Surfers’ Paradise) and Kings Cross (instead of King’s Cross) but can still have K’gari and O’Connors Park.
The English coined the term ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’ – so called because of the incorrect, ubiquitous addition before an ‘s’ instead of simply making something plural: writing banana’s instead of bananas, for example.
Apostrophes are used in cases of omission or possession. That’s it. Never plural, never just for decoration. Maybe in its death throes, the apostrophe is peppering itself everywhere as one last blast. We should just put it out of its misery.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.
