Dropped Apostrophes Spark Grammar War in BritainUnfortunately, I see evidence of this "confusion" with some frequency. For example:
By HARVEY MORRIS
LONDON — A local council in southern England has sparked a grammar war with proposals to ban the apostrophe from its street signs to avoid what it calls “adverse consequences in times of emergency.”
Guardians of English this week leapt to the defense of the language’s most misunderstood and misused punctuation mark in a furor that even prompted reaction from the government in London.
The Mid Devon Council, which has authority for naming streets in its particular corner of southwestern England, fired the opening shot by adopting a recommendation to outlaw the apostrophe in order to avoid confusion.
Image from Google Images
But is the answer to completely eliminate apostrophes? Might they really cause "adverse consequences in times of emergency?" That's crazy talk! More from the article:
The Plain English Campaign hit back by denouncing the ban as nonsensical. “Where’s it going to stop?” asked Steve Jenner, the group’s spokesman. “Are we going to declare war on commas, outlaw full stops?”
Mary de Vere Taylor, a copy editor who lives in the district, told the BBC she shuddered at the thought of the ban. “It’s almost as though somebody with a giant eraser is literally trying to erase punctuation from our consciousness,” she said.
Skirmishes over the wayward apostrophe are nothing new in the English-speaking world and generally involve its misuse.
Pro-apostrophe activists have included Sister Miriam Thomas, a Bronx community leader who campaigned to put the punctuation mark back into Hunts Point, a neighborhood in New York City borough of The Bronx.
And my colleague Sarah Lyall wrote in 2001 about the passions that led to the founding in Lincolnshire of the Apostrophe Protection Society.
Others have argued equally forcefully that what George Bernard Shaw, the Irish writer, called the “uncouth bacilli” of English grammar should be scrapped.Holy punctuation, Batman! There's an Apostrophe Protection Society? Sign me up?
Sometimes the problem is a surfeit of apostrophes, rather than their absence.
In all seriousness, as I read this article, all I could think was that this was evidence that schools had failed their students. Then it occurred to me that, because of required curriculum that is geared towards preparing students for standardized tests, even I have to put grammar on the back burner. I think this all ties in with my post from July 24th. Should we attempt to preserve traditional usage or embrace the new "language" that has evolved from increased exposure to technology?
I have no answer. My gut tells me that the people making these apostrophe aberrations are old enough to have missed the technological onslaught, but that still doesn't determine what should be done about the students in today's classrooms. Until I'm able to solve the world's communication conundrums, don't stop using apostrophes, simply:
Image from Google Images
Read more at: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/dropped-apostrophe-sparks-grammar-war/?ref=grammar&_r=0
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