The Apostrophe Protection Society‘s website is still open, but its founder, John Richards, decided to stop developing it in November 2019. These are his stated reasons:
“One is that at 96 I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language.”
If it is true that people no longer care about the correct use of the apostrophe, what–if anything–does this signify about the future of other punctuation marks?
I love the patterns and order in writing and sentence structure, but I recognize that language use changes over time.
In general, apostrophes denote possession or combine two words to make a contraction. The most common misuse or omission of apostrophes I’ve noticed is in the homophones:
there, they’re, their
and
your, you’re.
Having worked in television for 25 years, I’ve noticed that scripts often don’t contain apostrophes and–if they do–they are usually misplaced. But does it matter? If the words express important ideas and emotions, who cares about apostrophes and other strictures of grammar?
I don’t know. What do you think?
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