“Ignorance has Won”
“I didn’t find half a dozen people,” John Richards (96) said on his website about the past in his search for associates to join him.
Mr. Richards started a society after seeing the “same mistakes over and over again” in the usage of the Apostrophe. He had hoped he would find half a dozen people who felt the same way and join him.
“Instead, within a month of my plaint appearing in a national newspaper, I received over 500 letters of support, not only from all corners of the United Kingdom, but also from America, Australia, France, Sweden, Hong Kong and Canada.”
And the rules?
Apostrophes are used to denote a missing letter or letters and are used to denote possession. Apostrophes are never ever used to denote plurals.
John Richards started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 to make sure the “much-abused” punctuation mark was being used correctly. After 18 years, he will be closing down the society.
Fewer people and organizations are caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language.
“Apostrophe society shuts down because ‘ignorance and laziness have won,” Tim Baker, Evening Standard, December 1, 2019
“Apostrophes are never ever used to denote plurals.”
That is true. I have never, ever, in over 70 years seen an apostrophe used to designate a plural.
My Harcourt Brace college level English grammar book from back in the 1960s is more than happy with the use of an apostrophe to as part of the plural form of a number or symbol. So, fifty years ago, they would have been happy with calling it the 60’s. This is a battle from the distant past. It’s like the 18th century purists bitching that turtles were a type of dove, not tortoises.
Its a shame.
WTF – the world is literally burning, Nazi’ s are crawling out the shadows, and people worry about such trivialities? Why?
reason:
I am not sure how Trump came to be what he is today or how we came to endorse a babbling President who has trouble stringing 6 three to six letter words together to create a coherent sentence. He could be far more intellectual than what he is today just by association with the people he was with in school. He is not and maybe he never saw the need to be or decided not to be. So, why would the usage of punctuation be important?
I look to Trump and wonder why, looking to his verbalizations. Should we forgo the rules and structure of writing?
It is not as important as today’s events. I see it as a beginning . . .