Alaskan Range: The Apostrophe Debate
Greg Hill illuminates "the healthy debate that's always accompanied our ever-growing and changing language, and not its demise, which experts have been predicting for centuries.''
Peter Sellers, the late film comedian, once received a fan-letter that stated the sender "should be most grateful if you would kindly send me a singed photograph of yourself." Sellers obliged by sending a photo of himself that he first burnt around the edges with a lighter. Soon another letter from the same fan arrived requesting another photograph "as this one is signed all round the edges." Sellers would doubtlessly have appreciated Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten's recent article titled "Goodbye, Cruel Words: English. It's Dead to Me."
Weingarten's piece is a mock obituary for our language that reads in part, "The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the 'youngest' daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their 'younger' daughter. In doing so, however, the letter writer called the first couple the 'Obama's.' This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame."
It's true; the errant apostrophe in "Obama's" is incorrect grammar. Nevertheless, "The Oxford Companion to the English Language" asserts "There never was a golden age in which the rules for the use of the possessive apostrophe in English were clear-cut and known, understood, and followed by most educated people." I admit to unintentional apostrophe abuse from time to time, but its occurrence grieves me because I'm conscious of knowing better. I'm not alone, for the anti-apostrophe debate has raged for years.
Grammarian Richard Nordquist wrote in his About.com Grammar & Composition blog that the current crop of apostrophe haters seem to fall into two groups: instant messenger devotees who hate losing one of their limited allocation of characters per message, and "pragmatic educators who have apparently decided that trying to enforce the 'rules' in the face of the mark's widespread abuse is hardly worth the effort.". However, the opposition to the anti-apostrophe forces is formidable, with the American Apostrophe Association and the Apostrophe Protection Society standing tall for proper apostrophe usage.
Either way, it signifies the healthy debate that's always accompanied our ever-growing and changing language, and not its demise, which experts have been predicting for centuries. In 1667 Thomas Sprat decried "this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue … the evil is now so inveterate, that it is hard to know whom to blame, or where to begin to reform." Jonathan Swift was being perfectly serious in 1712 when he wrote "our Language is extremely imperfect … its daily Improvements are by no means proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities."
English was dying in the 18th and 19th centuries, too, and George Orwell wrote in 1946 that "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way." And in 2007 Dick Cavett wrote "there is plenty of evidence around to conclude that our grip on our glorious language may be loosening."
Then I take heart by noticing that A Word A Day http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=a+word+a+day&meta=&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=, the blog that's featured a special word every day for the past sixteen years, just passed the million mark in subscribers in 217 difference countries. Over 4,100 different words have been elaborated upon in that time, with the longest being "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," a "trophy word" coined in 1935 to describe a silica-based lung disease that was created only to be "the longest word in English," and it's since been repeatedly superseded.
Author Douglas Coupland suggested in a recent NY Times article a number of brand-new words that "encapsulate our present moment," like "proceleration" ("The acceleration of acceleration"). Several words were linked, such as "lyrical putty" ("The lyrics one creates in one's head in the absence of knowing a song's real lyrics"), and "karaokial amnesia" ("Most people don't know the complete lyrics to almost any song, particularly the ones they hold dear").
And our grammar woes would be over if everyone would simply adhere to "malfactory aversion" ("The ability to figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then stop doing it").
