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Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
- thomasedwards 7y ago> “We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won.” ok boomer. In the UK the stray apostrophe was commonly called “the greengrocer’s apostrophe” as it could be commonly found in greengrocers on signs like “apple’s”. When was the last time you even saw a greengrocer? The term “greengrocer’s apostrophe” is so old that it pre-dates the massive rise of supermarkets. This is nothing to do with modern times, people didn’t care in the ’50s and they don’t care now.
- Koshkin 7y ago> ok boomer Why would you call a 96-year old a "boomer"?
- thomasedwards 7y agoIt was a joke, but I forgot to include /s
- dang 7y ago> ok boomer Please keep this nasty trope far away from here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- thomasedwards 7y agoIt was a joke, but I forgot to include /s
- Stratoscope 7y ago/s does not turn a bad joke into a good one.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kizer 7y agoRichard, I swear to carry on you’re cause!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fingerlocks 7y agoIs the headline of the NYT Times article How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them, an incorrect use of the apostrophe that this society is rallying against? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/business/how-to-be-a-ceo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/business/how-to-be-a-ceo....
- larnmar 7y agoNo. There is something wrong with that headline, but the apostrophe is not it.
- fingerlocks 7y agoThe decade has possession of the experience? A decade of worth is also correct, sans the possessive noun.
- larnmar 7y ago“A decade worth” or “a decade’s worth” would be fine, “a decades worth” would not. If it still doesn’t sound right to you, try “in a year’s time”.
- fingerlocks 7y agoA “year” is possessive in your example, but “decade” is more ambiguous.
- praptak 7y agoIs it not a correct use of the apostrophe to denote possession?
- Stratoscope 7y agoYes, but not when it's "its". For example, if there is an autonomous writing machine, its words are not praptak's words nor mine.
- lacker 7y agoIts just simpler to not worry about the apostrophes. Theyre unnecessary for understanding what a sentence is saying. Im confident that future English will be slightly superior once it has eliminated the apostrophe.
- larnmar 7y agoLanguage communicates many things. Correct usage of apostrophes or who/whom is like metadata in your writing that communicates “I am at least educated enough to have been in fourth grade, and at least intelligent enough to have retained some pretty basic rules since then, and at least careful enough to give a damn”. It’s a weak signal, but it’s a signal nonetheless, and people aren’t going to give it up.
- exergy 7y agoMoreover, I think of it like how I think of clothes. You dress well not just for yourself but also as a mark of respect to those whom you're about to meet. Properly typed posts convey similar respect. Also, sorry to invoke the slippery slope argument, but otherwise what's stopping us from devolving all the way back to scriptura continua?
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> otherwise what's stopping us from devolving all the way back to scriptura continua? The facts that 1. People once trained generally do not have a problem identifying word boundaries. There are edge cases, but for whatever reason they don't tend to cause problems. 2. People overwhelmingly agree that marking of word boundaries in text is useful. Neither of those is true for apostrophes. They're hard for people to remember even after being trained, and they add no value.
- Brian_K_White 7y agoThey are not hard to remember, and they add value. Gee it's almost like stating an opinion as though it were a fact is free, and anyone can do it, and it means nothing, and so is a pointless waste of time, which says something about the worth of the insights of whoever does it.
- rosstex 7y agoWhomst'd've?
- King-Aaron 7y agoI am'nt
- sterlind 7y agoalternatively, "I ain't" which sounds beautiful to my Southern ears (though y'all and ain't are considered uneducated in some places so I unlearned them.)
- floatingatoll 7y agoIronic that he doesn’t use contractions in the quoted from the announcement.
- queensnake 7y agoPossessive is also contraction: "x's" <- "xes" <- "x his". No citation, but I read that somewhere. Interesting that it started out so primitive-seeming.
- kmm 7y agoI'm afraid that's not true. The 's particle comes from one of the many Old English genitive case endings, namely -es (no apostrophe of course). Interestingly, this "his genitive" emerged as a backformation of this genitive ending in the 13th century, not only in English but in a few other Germanic languages as well, before dying out a few hundred years later in some of them.
- ImaCake 7y agoMy instinct is to mock the ridiculousness of campaigning for correct use of apostrophes. Since english is pretty lawless these days and often gets dragged in new and wonderful directions. It seems stupid to rail against the tide of mutable grammar and syntax. But what about the development of High German and standard Italian? Both are examples where, with sufficient resources and nationalism, you can coalesce a disparate heap of diverge language(s) and make something coherent that people will stick to. Both of them (and others I can think of) had central government sponsored organisations to help. But english doesn't have anything more formal than the Oxford Dictionary, whoever decides state curriculums, and ESL staff. I wonder what organisations have the biggest impact on contemporary english? Google and Microsoft with their spellcheckers maybe?
- Taniwha 7y agoThe think is we dont need them in spoken English, we understand what people mean. Theres no reason why we need them when we write
- krisAU 7y agoI would argue that we convey the same meaning during speech by changing pitch, stressing certain vowels and consonants, etc. Things that we can't do in writing without things like apostrophes.
- ImaCake 7y agoThis is a good point. The way I usually think of this is that most of the time we simply don't need as much redundancy as we have encoded in language. It only becomes important in instructions for complicated things, scientific papers, or when you are communicating over the top of loud noises or a bad phone connection. I don't think explains the forces that shape our language fully, but it does provide a starting point!
- solarkraft 7y agoThere absolutely is. Your misspelling of thing completely distracted me while reading, checking whether you were making some more complex joke, actually meant think, etc.
- foobar1962 7y agoThe Title should have been "Apostrophe Society Shut's Down..."
- ChainOfFools 7y agoIm surprised this isnt the top comment. Beautiful compression!
- senectus1 7y agoHey if people can be Gender fluid why can't words be possessive fluid...?
- mikorym 7y ago> Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won' Well, it's that, or the fact that the "founder" is 96 and is cutting back on his hobbies.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Nasrudith 7y agoReally the ambigious apostrophed words are themselves analogous to UI design flaws. If most are getting the assumptions wrong then it is the interface which is bad.
- commandlinefan 7y ago> ignorance and laziness It’s not just ignorance. Plain ignorance is normally corrected by education. In the case of grammar and spelling, people actually get DEFENSIVE about doing things wrong. “I’m not writing a college essay, you know what I was trying to say” is a common retort when somebody’s spelling or grammar is pointed out to be incorrect. If you can’t even remember the correct rules of written speech in a single language (your NATIVE LANGUAGE), you really ought to step back and consider whether or not you’re really as smart as you think you are.
- LikeAnElephant 7y agoFair, but also consider: If the rules are confusing and the proper meaning can be conveyed without following them anyway... maybe it's not worth remembering the minutiae?
- thedaemon 7y agoWhat you've just stated, "I'm not writing a college essay, you know what I was trying to say" is covered under the second designation, laziness.
- jeb1934 7y agoThis is complete malarkey
- Gunax 7y agoIt's not really possible to correct errors like this without being a pretentious ass. It's possible that the apostrophe rules we have today we become outdated a-la the who/whom distinction.
- cmdshiftf4 7y ago>It's possible that the apostrophe rules we have today we become outdated a-la the who/whom distinction. Outdated due to ignorance driven by laziness.
- make3 7y agovery few linguists are prescriptivists. Grammatical rules have always (only) emerged from use, and language is expected to evolve through the decades.
- jfengel 7y agoI'm as anti-prescriptivist as the next linguist, but I do admit I find the "greengrocer's apostrophe" ugly. Perhaps because it's unnecessary -- confusing "it's" and "its" is a simple enough mistake to make, but the rule for plurals is simply "add an s" and no more effort is required. I suspect I find it galling because people make work for themselves, which somehow makes it worse. I'm all for people who do guerilla copyediting, fixing incorrect signs, especially if they do so in an amusing way. Just carping about it, however, isn't very productive.
- coolgeek 7y agoThe most important part: > The rules Mr Richards gave for apostrophes are: They are used to denote a missing letter or letters, they are used to denote possession and apostrophes are never ever used to denote plurals.
- chkaloon 7y ago"The rules Mr Richards gave for apostrophes are: They are used to denote a missing letter or letters, they are used to denote possession and apostrophes are never ever used to denote plurals." Where is the Oxford Comma Society when you need it!