KEY POINTS:
The rants of Kerre Woodham and Jim Hopkins at an academic's suggestion we abandon the apostrophe reminded me of the Robert Conquest dictum that people are reactionary on things they know about. He meant that people like to protect their little bailiwicks of knowledge by repelling attacks from
those they like to think are the intellectually unwashed.
Punctuation, like grammar and most human behaviour, is always in flux and I think it a very strong likelihood that the apostrophe, certainly where it denotes the possessive case, will disappear over the next decade or so for a simple reason - it almost never makes any difference to meaning. That is why so many people do not bother with it.
Robert Burchfield, the New Zealand-born scholar, wrote in The English Language (1985): "The prevalence of incorrect instances of the use of the apostrophe at the present time, even in the work of otherwise reasonably well-educated people, together with the abandonment of it by many business firms, suggest that the time is close at hand when this moderately useful device should be abandoned."
"Moderately useful", but not useful enough. I'm delighted that an academic is more concerned with the practical effect of punctuation or grammar on meaning than the thoughtless insistence on a prescriptive approach by practitioners like Woodham and Hopkins. (Using like as I did in that sentence would have cost me marks in the School Certificate, but usage has long since approved. In fact, like has a life of its own now, sprinkled through spoken English as though it were [subjunctive] a form of spoken punctuation, replacing um and ah and you know.)
The days when linguistic conservatives imposed irrelevant rules governing punctuation and grammar on schoolchildren have gone, I hope, a change possibly led by people like our berated academic who are more concerned with clarity of meaning. The subjunctive case, for example, is on the way out, but with barely a whimper because, like me, Woodham and Hopkins would have trouble defining it, and in fact know it only from rote use in such contexts as If I were king. They can't fight a reactionary battle because they don't really know what it is. It has been atrophying as a case for as long as I can remember.
I can recall being taught a "rule" at primary school that a comma should never come before and or but. When I was a young journalist, I often heard cadet reporters bawled out by subeditors for splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions - two rules which existed only because English public schools and universities revered Latin.
I remember when ongoing came along, used as an exact synonym for continuing. A friend of mine proclaimed, "There is no such word!" Another, wiser friend said: "There will be." Shakespeare invented hundreds of words, turned nouns into verbs and seemed ignorant of, or at least indifferent to, grammar and punctuation as long as he could say what he meant. The title of one of my favourite books on grammar is Woe is I by an American woman, Patricia T. O'Conner, drawing attention to what many would think a Shakespearian solecism.
Had Woodham and Hopkins been around at the time they would have castigated Ophelia for daring to ignore the rule that the verb to be takes the same case after as before.
Given the present trend, I think that rule will probably also die as its uselessness becomes clearer. O'Conner wrote: "The laws of grammar come and go. We make [them] up when we need them, and discard them when we don't." The same goes for the rules of punctuation.
The colon and its half-brother the semi-colon have, in my lifetime, had periods of high and low fashion and subtle changes of use. In a memoir, the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut makes a strong case against the semi-colon - and then at the end of his argument drops one in, perfectly positioned to verify its existence, demonstrating the futility of rules. Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, that wonderfully entertaining book of a few years ago, was partly a testament to grammarian neurosis.
Writing precisely is important but clarity does not depend on the sedulous devotion to rules. It would be nice if Woodham and Hopkins would stop the mindless noise about rules and pay more attention to the daily obfuscations wrought by cliches, mangled metaphors and abuses of grammar and punctuation that seriously affect meaning.
For example, only a tin ear and empty mind could allow television reporter after television reporter to start human interest stories with variations of that monstrous 9/11 cliche: "It has changed his/her/their life/lives forever." Their bosses should change their lives forever by firing them.
