I was having a good day at work on Wednesday. Basically I
accomplished a few quite difficult tasks quite quickly which impressed my line
manager, who remarked, “Fair play, you’re having a good day.” To which I
replied,
“Hey, it’s always a good day when I don’t have to teach
children how you’re supposed to use an apostrophe.” It’s something of a
standard response of mine – I also use it in this way whenever something isn’t
going quite right – “Well, look on the bright side. I might still have been
trying to teach 13 year olds how to use the apostrophe.” Yes, okay, there’s a
little exaggeration there, but maybe not as much as you think.
Putting my retired English specialist hat on, I have no
hesitation in saying that apostrophes are little sods. Much like some of the
kids to whom I was trying to teach them. When I was at university and then when
I was training we were confidently told – “Oh, the apostrophe will fall out of
use and disappear within about 50 years.” That was back in 1986. It’s been 40
years and they’re still like stinking fish.
Before I retired I discussed this on a number of occasions
with colleagues and we all tended to agree. One of the things you might not be
aware of is that when you teach English, you start to catch bad spelling and
apostrophitis off the children. I doubt that it’s an officially recognised
condition but my take on it is that over the years you read so much badly
written rubbish (look, I’m not being deliberately rude. The majority of what
kids write is rubbish – your job is to make it less rubbishy over a period of
time) that it becomes subconsciously learned behaviour. Without even realising
you’re doing it you start automatically putting an apostrophe between the
penultimate consonant and the s at the end of perfectly innocent words that
don’t have an apostrophe. Or between the d and the n in a word like couldn’t. You
have no excuse – you know the rules and the correct way to do it. But you have
apostrophitis and from now on you’re going to have to check every one that you
use is in the right place.
I used to find that , by and large, you could carry some of
the kids with you with the idea that the apostrophe is where the missing
letters would have been. But once you start talking about possessives, then you
can forget it. – Yes, I do know that the possessive apostrophe is actually
still an omission mark – in archaic English we would have said David his blog –
thus in modern English David’s blog the possessive apostrophe denotes missing
letters as well. Well, good luck explaining that to kids and not making them
more confused than they were to begin with.
The stupidest thing about it is that when you get right
down to it, we dont really need apostrophes to make sense of a sentences
meaning because its all in the context. In the vast majority of cases the
meaning even without an apostrophe is still clear. Case in point- I
deliberately left out three of them in the first sentence of this paragraph.
But you still understood it perfectly.
Don’t get me started on colons and semi colons.
