“Ignorance and laziness have won,” said retired British journalist John Richards a while ago.
Richards, who turned 96 when he made that observation, started the Apostrophe Protection Society about twenty years ago. He crusaded for the correct use of the “much abused” apostrophe. But he has given up. He told the London Evening Standard late in 2019 there were two reasons for disbanding his organization: “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. We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won.”
His society was a small one. Depressingly small, it seems. He told the Standard he started the APS after he saw the “same mistakes over and over again.” He hoped to find a half-dozen people who felt the same way. He didn’t find a half-dozen. Within a month of his announcement of the founding of the society, he said, “I received over 500 letters of support, not only from all corners of the United Kingdom, but also from America, Australia, France, Sweden, Hong Kong and Canada.
But that wasn’t enough (Note the apostrophe).
That sentence is an example of one of the three simple rules Richards has given for proper use of the apostrophe.
- They are used to denote a missing letter or letters.
- They are used to denote possession.
- Apostrophes are never used to denote plurals.
And there’s a corollary. “It’s” only means “it is.” The possessive version is “its.” The cat had its breakfast.
Otherwise, this sign says “Food at it is best.” The Towne Grill in Jefferson City isn’t (note the proper use of the apostrophe to symbolize the elimination of the letter “o”) going to change its (note proper use of the possessive) sign. It has become an institution in Missouri’s capital city, a quirky but incorrect use of the apostrophe that is part of the city’s (proper use of the apostrophe to denote the possessive) culture.
The Apostrophe Protection Society seems so English. The story about it reminded us of Professor Henry Higgins in Lerner & Lowe’s Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” of a half-century ago. Professor Higgins decided to teach an untutored London flower girl to speak proper English and lamented:
An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him
One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get
Oh, why can’t the English learn to
Set a good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears
There even are places where English completely disappears
In America, they haven’t used it for years!
To end this on a couple of more serious notes:
First, John Richards died earlier this year—March 30. He was 97. Mr. Richards’s Washington Post obituary is at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-richards-dead/2021/04/25/9c7c1994-a425-11eb-a774-7b47ceb36ee8_story.html.
Second, I had a friend named Ed Bliss who used to write news for Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite at CBS. Ed, who died several years ago, often conducted newswriting seminars at our conventions of news directors. I can still hear him say, “We have become a nation slovenly with language. The slovenliness in grammar, punctuation, and spelling is all about us.”
If we lack respect for our language in speaking and writing, we limit our abilities as a people to communicate effectively and we damage the trust we can have in one another. Today, we shout more than we speak; we talk but we don’t listen; we tweet more than we write; we dismiss one another with disparaging personal assessments. In the midst of this noise, this transformation of the grace of our language into crudeness, it is no wonder that a group that upheld something as small as an apostrophe should feel that “ignorance and laziness” have won.
It’s not just the continued improper use of apostrophes that should concern us. Our language deserves better use than we are making of it. We cannot respect one another if we do not respect the language we use with one another.