Apostrophe Now

On your marks
Lauren very kindly drew my attention, earlier in the week, to this article from BBC News Online about the perennial apostrophe problem, and I've been meaning to lay into it ever since. So, sorry if there are too many posts today, but sometimes they really are like the proverbial buses.

In a vague attempt to be even-handed I'm going to focus first on this things about which this Burridge person and I do broadly agree:

The hyphen is...surplus to requirements in many cases... because even the editors of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary admitted they're not sure of its proper usage.

She is probably right here, god knows I misuse and abuse the hyphen as much as anyone; have never been able to shake off the habit entirely, despite the best efforts of my A Level English teacher, Mrs Cowley (now, there was a woman who was a stickler for the finer points of the English language. In retrospect this may explain a lot). The temptation is always to use it where, I think, a semi-colon would be more appropriate.

...the emphasis should be on clarity, rather than rules.

Well, yes, but arguably the two go hand-in-hand. If the rules are followed properly, the clarity tends to follow automatically. It's messing up the rules - misplaced word order, bad punctuation - that obscures meaning more than anything. Clarity is indeed what it should all be about, ultimately, and an unhealthy fixation with the more obscure grammatical dictacts* that spoils the primary function of communication is both pointless and self-defeating.

According to Roy Corden of Nottingham Trent University:

The fundamentals of grammar will always be needed but people tend to act as if all the rules have been handed down from on high and cannot be altered. The problem with that is language is always changing, the internet and mobile phones have had a dramatic impact on it.

This is very true. But if anything, the exclusiveness (in the sense that only certain sections of the population really understand it with any fluency) and sheer ugliness of "text speak" make it less clear and communicate the message less well than standard written English would do. Clearly, the nature of communication has changed in a fundamental way in the last decade or so, and we need to recognise those changes in our language, but there has to be some measure of selection in what becomes part of the mainstream. I mean, for god's sake:

She is currently backing a campaign to get the "yeah-but-no-but" catchphrase of Little Britain character Vicky Pollard entered into the Collins English Dictionary

It's a fad. The dictionary is a reference book, not some kind of guide to cultural fashions. Of course there should be a place in it for new words, but "yeah-but-no-but" is a cachphrase, not something that denotes a new concept in itself.

Realise I have gone on about this at greater length and with more pretension than necessary, though god knows there's plenty more to say, but am going to make one final point:

The normal apostrophe is useful but not the possessive... Its supporters say it avoids ambiguity in meaning, (like sisters' books/sister's books), but Burridge thinks context makes it redundant

She is wrong. The possessive apostrophe, correctly used, gives exactly the clarity that Burridge claims to value in language, just as its misuse has the opposite effect. Sometimes it's knowing the little details in the rules that can make something clever, or subtle, or even funny.


* yes, yes, I know exactly how pot/kettle that sounds