FOR GEORGE Bernard Shaw they were "uncouth bacilli", redundant impediments to communication and he banished most of them from his plays as part of his campaign to simplify the English language. The apostrophe that Shaw so despised survived his onslaught, but today struggles on much-ignored and much-abused, and discarded altogether in the new medium of text messages.
A poll in Britain last week found that nearly half of its 2,000 respondents were unable to use the punctuation mark properly. The usual culprits topped the list of mistakes: "they're" and "their", "its" and it's", and the ubiquitous greengrocer's (greengrocers'?) apostrophe for plurals in vegetables.
The poll prompted a flurry of calls for the apostrophe to be ditched and recently the president of the Spelling Society, Prof John Wells of University College London (a professor no less, et tu Brute), suggested that the apostrophe should no longer be taught. It and other peculiar English spellings are a barrier to literacy, he argues.
No point in standing against the tide of usage, it's too difficult to remember the rules, the abolitionists claim. And anyway, they argue, in most cases, the meaning intended is clear from the context. True, but also true of the vast majority of spelling mistakes. Are we then to abandon altogether the struggle for a common, universal language and the clarity of meaning it brings? Surely one of the great achievements of culture?
For some, the apostrophe, since it first colonised the language from the French in the 16th Century, has gone on to become as redundant as the tonsils. Yet, unlike the tonsils, it does retain its several purposes, mainly in signalling possession or missing letters, and thus in avoiding ambiguity. Without being overzealous or precious - it is unnecessary to remind readers of the etymology of 'bus every time we use the word - it is nevertheless worth struggling to preserve the apostrophe, if only as a matter of common courtesy. Rather than expecting a reader to decipher context, politeness requires the onus of explicitness to be on the writer.
We have no Académie Française to defend the language, although even it only has the power of recommendation. No law or diktat can preserve the apostrophe against the tide of neglect, but educators must certainly be required to continue teaching its use. And, perhaps, we could take on board a recent suggestion from the French debate on the "redundant" semi-colon: a quota of apostrophes in all government-issued documents. After all it's working for the Irish language.
