Misunderstood, the apostrophe slides towards extinction

Colin Randall

• Last Updated: February 07. 2009 9:30AM UAE / February 7. 2009 5:30AM GMT

My good friend Pete Sixsmith is a highly experienced teacher, a man of great wit and knowledge. Whenever work takes me overseas, he volunteers some little-known fact, retrieved from the archives of his brain, about my destination.

Skopje, Macedonia? Ah, yes, the railway station clock stopped at 5.17am on July 26, 1963 when the city was struck by an earthquake. Halifax, Nova Scotia? Of course. Is that not where 2,000 people died when a French munitions ship exploded in 1917?

These are not details plucked from the internet. Pete has had a fund of such snippets since long before Google arrived to make life easier for people without his retentive powers.

But when it comes to apostrophes, he is as lost as his less academically inclined pupils. The distinction between its and it’s confuses him. For the plural form of numerals or phrases abbreviated to initials, he adds ’s without a moment’s thought. Thus, he owns a collection of CD’s, and also some long-playing records from the 1960’s.

If Pete is even aware of this deficiency in his grasp of a language he generally expresses so well, he will be gratified to learn that he has important allies.

As we have already seen, there is Stephen Fry, that most erudite and well-spoken of actors and broadcasters. Mr Fry could not care less about missing or misused apostrophes. And a city council in England has now turned a similar outlook into official policy.

Martin Mullaney, who chairs Birmingham’s transport scrutiny committee, sees the punctuation mark as a nuisance and says it will be dropped from all street signs.

The intention is to put an end to inconvenient debate on whether apostrophes are really necessary in such locations as St Paul’s Square or King’s Heath. In fact, the issue is not new to Birmingham; the decision merely formalises what officials have been doing by stealth for 50 years, quietly eliminating apostrophes all over the city.

If Mr Mullaney is to be believed, Pete is not the only one to be confused by questions of usage.

Passing an English A-level examination, he says, is not a prerequisite to finding a restaurant. That is plainly true, but also sounds dangerously like the start of an argument for banning the teaching of English altogether.

Preceding both Mr Fry and Mr Mullaney was Mr Howse. I know the scholarly Christopher Howse; he has many interests, but I had no idea that campaigning against silly old rules of grammar was one of them. On the contrary, he wrote last November on his blog for The Daily Telegraph of London that the “greengrocer’s apostrophe” – signs for apple’s and pear’s – had an honoured place in the history of English.

A couple called Martin would be known as the Martin’s. “As the Martin’s what?” seems one obvious follow-up question, but Mr Howse is having none of it; if apostrophes can not be abolished, he says, they should at least stop “spoiling our lives”. “There would be no risk whatsoever of being misunderstood,” he insists, “if the pronoun its were spelt with an apostrophe: it’s.”

It’s – or, as Mr Howse would perhaps prefer, its – more than enough to drive me to the pages of Fowler’s Modern English Usage for reassurance. I find it, in these stern words: “To insert an apostrophe in the plural of an ordinary noun is a fatuous vulgarism.”

You are no longer with us, Mr Fowler (1858–1933), but thank you for what I regard as no less a fact than the occurrence of the disaster in Halifax during your lifetime. I feel better already, and must pass it on to Pete.

Colin Randall is the executive editor of The National. He may be contacted at crandall@thenational.ae