Apropostrophe of nothing

It’s become something of a cliche to claim grocers and other imagined under-educated tribes cannot or will not use the apostrophe and English is on its way to hell to join Latin and Esperanto.

It was something of a sad surprise when I recently criss-crossed Britain to see evidence this might be true. Maybe we can forgive the odd independent shop…

…or shut down nightclubs…

…but when an international chain store commits a punctuation crime, well, should we all just give up?

English is the ultimate bastard tongue. Greek, Latin, Norse, Old English, Gaelic, French and a raft of Germanic madness mashed up leaving us with a simple but extremely badly spelt lexicon. Most modifiers to words have evolved away but possession with an apostrophe lingered because, arguably, it’s quite useful. Why does it exist at all?

Well, a while back we used to add -es to a word to show possession:

Jameses

The doges

This was then contracted to James’s and The Dog’s, respectively.

Oddly, we omit the possessive apostrophe from personal pronouns, which is confusing, but we say:

yours

hers

theirs

And never your’s etc.

Except this is English, so no rules really work because you ought to say one’s and someone’s. No idea why.

Maybe I have become too conservative, afterall, English got simpler and therefore better by not sticking to silly rules that separate the superior educated from the unwashed. It’s hard to find a situation that would be genuinely confusing without the possessive apostrophe. And it would do away with endless debates about whether it’s Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day.

(That said is this Mr Wilkinson’s shop or the Wilkinson Brothers’ shop?)

I think those little punctuation marks liven up writing and makes text look interesting, so, for now, I am keeping up the campaign, along with Pete, here: