apostrophe pedant

We need to acknowledge the efforts made by John Richards who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001. Aged 96 he is calling it a day on a rather gloomy note. He feels that he has lost and the vast majority of people who misuse the apostrophe have won. I hope he cheers up over Christmas and tries to avert his gaze from now on from all the plurals with apostrophes that he sees.

 Richards was trained as a subeditor in the days when subeditors were minor gods of a somewhat authoritarian nature.  His eye was drawn to the misused apostrophe at work but now he sees it in the wild, so to speak.

 Tiger Webb at the ABC argues that there was never a golden age of the apostrophe when people used it correctly. I don’t agree with that. People may have occasionally made mistakes but the widespread use of the apostrophe s to mark plurals is a comparatively recent phenomenon. In England it was called the grocer’s apostrophe because it was most often seen in public in hand-written shop signs. With the advent of the internet everyone’s writing has become public and it is evident that it is not only grocers who do it. It is intruding in a much greater variety of texts.

 Tiger is correct in saying that punctuation rules are not set in stone and there have been fashions at different periods, which have changed over time.  It is possible for us to change our use of the apostrophe but we should change it for better rather than for worse. It would be better to drop the use of the apostrophe except in a few limited instances than to spread useless and misguided apostrophes all over our writing.