Apostrophe's

There’s apparently a movement to eliminate the apostrophe symbol from English. While cutting this curved little line might lower the blood pressure of people like me who can’t stand the misuse of it’s and its, I don’t think an apostrophe-free language is a good idea for a number of reasons.

The reasoning behind the punctuation change is what bothers me. There’s some group called Kill the Apostrophe that says the apostrophe “serves only to annoy those who know how it is supposed to be used and to confuse those who dont.” A mark of punctuation confuses people who don’t know how to use it? Have you ever considered, I don’t know, learning the proper usage?

But no. By all means, let’s eliminate the apostrophe altogether so people who are lazy and ignorant can remain lazy and ignorant.

The other thing that floors me is the argument that the apostrophe is “wasteful, snobbish and anachronistic” nowadays when people are texting. Let me get into high dudgeon and pull out my editor’s red pen and lacerate everyone with my arguments against this.

First of all, what on earth does an apostrophe waste? Space on the page or screen? There are enough editor’s tricks that you can easily tighten your content without cutting a mark of punctuation. Does it waste time? Yeah, typing that ‘ is 0.0004 seconds you’ll never get back. How about wasting ink or file sizes? We expend enough ink and kilobytes on stupid crap anyway and we can eliminate these wastes before cutting the apostrophe. Start by not printing every work email you get.

Second, you have to be really dumb to believe the correct use of apostrophes is snobbish. Yeah, me with all my book learnin’ just showing up the common folk. Let’s spell it out: an apostrophe takes the place of a letter or letters, so “let’s” is an abbreviation for “let us.” It also denotes possession. It’s not difficult for anyone with a second-grade education to understand that. I don’t think I’m some kind of aristocratic snob for grasping this concept.

Finally, it’s certainly not an anachronism to use apostrophes in the age of text messages. I fully admit that I skip apostrophes and other marks of punctuation when texting out of impatience and the fact that I don’t have a real keyboard on my phone. But I certainly will follow the rules when I write something that’s not on a phone.

Why do we have to dumb down the English language because some people are using it incorrectly? Changing our language based on texting style is like giving up. It’s like wearing pajama pants and flip-flops to social engagements because hey, everyone’s doing it, right? And you just end up looking awful.

I get that language changes over time but I think it should change to become more precise and more sophisticated, not less. I feel like some people excuse their own mistakes by saying “language changes” and they sound like kids in a high school English class who know they’re wrong but are launching a Hail Mary at the teacher in an attempt to cover their asses.

I just want to live in a world with can’t and don’t, not cant and dont.