Friday 30 January 2009

Save The Possessive Apostrophe!

Foreigners often remark, with a sly grin, that English is the easiest language in the world to learn. I don’t take that as a compliment, but as a playful poke that English, despite Shakespeare, is unsophisticated and lacking in expression. Of course, I don’t believe that for a second. But the movement backing the abolition of the apostrophe (and I wonder how many of them speak a second language), is doing its very best to destroy one of English’s unique eccentricities.

The Times reported today that Birmingham City Council has decreed that possessive apostrophes shall no longer appear on street signs. The Times ran a photo of the correctly written sign, “St Paul’s Square” against the new sign, “St Pauls Square”. It is a painful sight to look upon.

Before Christmas I heard Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight coming out in favour of dropping the possessive apostrophe with the brisk line: “It is not necessary”.

Using the possessive apostrophe actually gets us to think about what we are saying and who or what belongs to whom or what – whether or not we think possession is a good idea in itself.

The possessive apostrophe is also useful and practical in certain grammatical phrases, and it is fun!

Let’s fight for the possessive apostrophe and, at the same time, for the English subjunctive! Oh, and the semicolon!

2 comments:

Paul Taberham said...

Well, I'm undecided on this one. Some of the rules about apostrophes should be re-thought. They appear to be counter intuitive. Often students will use them in essays and get if wrong more frequently than right, as far as I can tell.

Plus reading about how it works is irritating. Condiser the following quote,

"No apostrophe is used in the following possessive pronouns and adjectives: yours, his, hers, ours, its, theirs, and whose. (Many people wrongly use it's for the possessive of it, but authorities are unanimous that it's can only be a contraction of it is or it has.) All other possessive pronouns ending in s do take an apostrophe: one's; everyone's; somebody's, nobody else's, etc. With plural forms, the apostrophe follows the s, as with nouns: the others' husbands (but compare They all looked at each other's husbands, in which both each and other are singular)."

But it seems wrong to say it's unneccessary. Here is another quote:

"Each of these four phrases has a distinct meaning:

* My sister's friend's investments (the investments belonging to a friend of my sister)
* My sister's friends' investments (the investments belonging to several friends of my sister)
* My sisters' friend's investments (the investments belonging to a friend of several of my sisters)
* My sisters' friends' investments (the investments belonging to several friends of several of my sisters)"

So, I'm sitting on the fence on this one...

Karen Burke said...

I loved reading the rules you just recited!

And not every rule is straight forward.

I think the possessive apostrophe has character and we have to make allowances for how it is applied when it comes up against other rules.