Are we losing the apostrophe? Is it just too much trouble? This little squiggle, so like a comma except that it has been hoisted up above the letters instead of hooked below the baseline, comes to us through French, which has many words that slide together. (Qu’est-ce que c’est?) Gertrude Stein, who had no use for commas and hated the question mark, had a weakness for the apostrophe. In “Poetry and Grammar,” she wrote that “for some the possessive case apostrophe has a gentle tender insinuation that makes it very difficult to definitely decide to do without.”
Probably we should not rely on Gertrude Stein, however, if the idea is to write clearly. The apostrophe has two uses in English: it forms the possessive, as so sweetly renounced by Ms. Stein, and it papers over contractions, closing up a gap in a word where a letter or letters have dropped out: can’t, won’t, don’t, ain’t; o’clock; Chock full o’Nuts; rock ’n’ roll (if you must); po’boy (if you want an oyster sandwich instead of an indigent youth). Neither of these functions elevates the apostrophe to the rank of a true mark of punctuation: it changes the form of a word without indicating a pause or a stop or an intonation or having any effect at the level of the sentence. Like the blank in a game of Scrabble (if Scrabble allowed contractions or possessives), it fills in for a missing letter. But for various reasons this subtle signal is under attack.
Something there is in cyberspace that doesn’t love an apostrophe. It is scorned in domain names. The GPS does not recognize it. In England, home of the Apostrophe Protection Society, there was a big flap in 2013, when the Mid-Devon District Council banned the apostrophe in certain place-names “to avoid ‘confusion.’ ” It would have affected the signs for Beck’s Square, Blundell’s Avenue, and St. George’s Well. One Mary de Vere Taylor, a proofreader from Ashburton, said that “the thought of apostrophes being removed made her shudder. . . . ‘Some may say I should get a life and get out more but if I got out more and saw place names with no apostrophes where there should be I shudder to think how I’d react.’ ”
With the advent of texting, there is less will to insist on the apostrophe, even in contractions. People are lazy, and it’s a pain to have to switch screens, from letters to symbols and back again, in order to type “I’ll” instead of letting the phone take over and write “ill.” I like apostrophes, but I am continually frustrated by the ready-made forms that my smartphone throws up. Contractions are less formal in speech, but if they’re cumbersome to type either the apostrophe will disappear or the contraction will become two words again.
In the end, the Mid-Devon council backed down. It never meant to do away with the apostrophe entirely, or suggest that the rules governing it were so confusing that we might as well give up. It’s not rocket science. But the GPS bounces off satellites—it is rocket science—and no one had programmed into it Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the 2003 best-seller in which Lynne Truss sorted out the possessive (“the British government’s idea”) from the plural (“the ideas of governments on both sides of the Atlantic”) and the plural possessive (“all governments’ stupid ideas”). The three Mid-Devonian apostrophes were saved, at least for now. The Apostrophe Protection Society rejoiced, and linguists snickered to think that people really thought they couldn’t do without the apostrophe or even considered it a mark of punctuation.
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