No-one Under the Age of Thirty Seems to Know the Correct Time to Insert an Apostrophe in English. Does it Really Matter? Well, I Believe it Does and the Fact that Nobody Except me Seems to Care too Much is Typical of the British ‘Don’t Care’ Attitude.
We in the English speaking world don't exactly speak Chaucer or Shakespeare any more. Our wonderfully rich language has evolved enormously and continues to do so almost by the day. We can't get through a year without new words appearing, old words disappearing and existing words changing their meaning. Some of the new words have obviously been needed to cope with new inventions such as television or video. Those that are dropped from everyday usage reflect the changes in our society - the term “scurvy knave”, for example, is no longer appropriate. They are replaced by less exciting but equally derogatory expressions such as "prat". And then we have words like "gay", which change their meaning - it originally referred to happiness or joviality; then it came to be a term used to describe homosexuals and now it is used to criticise an idea or person we think is not very good. And don't get me started on the word "chav"! Other changes include starting sentences with the word "and", which was never allowed during my school days, and ending a sentence with a preposition as in "Who does that belong to?", which was previously, "To whom does that belong?"
Some of these changes are natural progressions or corruptions. Others are down to ignorance, while some can be attributed to pure laziness. The big change in written English that has annoyed me more than any other is the use or non-use of the apostrophe. It seems that in Britain anyone under the age of thirty has little idea how and when to use the apostrophe. As a result, apostrophes crop up in all sorts of strange places, some people ditch them altogether, while others make a token effort be inserting one when they feel it is the right time because they haven't sued one for a couple of paragraphs.
Here is a brief run down of when we should use apostrophes:
*to indicate possession. For example, the ball belonging to John becomes John's ball. If there is a plural possessive, such as the ball belonging to the boys, then we should write the boys' ball. Confusion sometimes reigns with a plural such as children, but this would become the children's ball. There have always been difficulties with names ending in "s", such as James, when there are two alternatives, either James' ball or James's ball - both appear to be acceptable.
*to replace a letter in colloquial English. Instead of the more formal "do not", we can write or say "don"t'.
That is basically it. So, what is so hard about that? Why do I get intelligent, university-educated English graduates telling me they have no idea when to use an apostrophe? In my job, when I correct someone for not using an apostrophe correctly I ask if they know when to insert one. The answers I have include:
*'No idea.'
*'No idea - and it doesn't really matter.'
*For plurals as in one car, two car's. Wrong - and that one really gets my blood boiling.
*'I sort of know', which annoys me more than the first one because it means "I don"t know, but I'm embarrassed to admit it.'
*Whenever a word ends in "s".
One of the most common misusages concerns refers to a decade. The 60s are commonly written as the 1960's. Wrong. We are talking about the Sixties, not the Sixty's. But it is so commonplace now that more often than not people write the 60's and it has become accepted.
So, what's happened to written English? - (spoken English is also on the decline, but for different reasons). I believe our education system in Britain has branched out. When I was at school, we were taught English - reading and writing - and maths to a very high standard. Other subjects such as history, French and chemistry were also taught. Nowadays, there is so much more to education than traditional subjects, which is a good thing. But this has been to the detriment of the basics of English and maths.
As far as I am concerned, the thing that gnarls me so much is that people don't seem to care. When I try to explain how to use an apostrophe, young people look at me as if to say, "So what? What does it matter?" They don't care that they are doing something incorrectly. Their attitude seems to be, "Well, so long as I"m understood, what does a little jot on a piece of paper or a computer screen mean?' I'm afraid I don't have the patience to argue against such slovenly approaches to our language which has been so carefully crafted down the generations. But, with increasing amounts of text language creeping into everyday usage, the poor old apostrophe looks destined for the scrapheap.
