The linguist, Dr Vaclav Brezina, said recently “There has been a very noticeable drop in the use of apostrophes.” He puts this down to social media, where they are often left out to reduce the character count. Perhaps they are also left out in the interests of speed, or so that the tweeter, or whoever, comes across as ‘cool’ and not weighed down with stuffy grammatical niceties.
Dr Brezina recently lead a team of researchers who analysed a million words and found an 8% decline in the use of the apostrophe since the 1990s. Sounds plausible – though maybe the researchers didn’t include in their investigations the market stalls and shop windows where ‘greengrocer’s apostrophes’ still seem to be thriving – tomatoe’s and onion’s anyone? And didn’t take note either of the many student essays and office reports that insist on an apostrophe in dates – welcome to the 2020’s! Misuse so endemic that the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society officially wound up his campaign in 2019 stating sadly that “ignorance has won.”
Many people will be happy to wave the apostrophe goodbye, claiming that we can make ourselves understood without it. Indeed it is impossible to replicate the apostrophe in speech, and we work out if we mean there, their, or they’re, from context. And complaints about the use of the apostrophe are as old as the apostrophe itself – Jane Austen and Shakespeare are among the literary greats who were inconsistent in their usage.
In fact the apostrophe was only invented in the sixteenth century as a printers’ tool, and many of its uses – primarily to denote possession, or indicate a missing letter – were only formalised in the nineteenth century. Maybe soon, style guides will be on the side of the ‘lazy’ students who don’t know their your from their you’re, or the 1960s from the 1960’s, and apostrophes will be assigned to the bin.
I’m sure we’d manage to understand each other most of the time. Though there will be some confusion. We wouldn’t know, for example, whether to just hold your nose, or call the police or environmental services if, when checking on your eccentric neighbour’s house whilst she was away, you found she’d left a note telling you to ignore the evil-smelling-tarpaulin-covered mound on the patio as it was her sons.
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