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The apostrophe joins the endangered list

By Michelle Smith - posted Monday, 20 December 2010


Think of the wildly variant situations evoked by the phrases "the mother's child" and "the mothers' child". With the death of the apostrophe, we will lose a fragment of subtlety in our linguistic arsenal.

Most people know how gauche it would be to use "comic sans" font on a poster design, but a missing apostrophe isn't an embarrassment. The AWOL apostrophe is ubiquitous. It is present in catalogues for major retailers and glossy corporate brochures.

I'd beg for a recall and pulping of the flyer if my business had just proclaimed to thousands of customers that "Our Visions Your Vision". The reality is that there is never a recall, a correction, or a trace of post-apostrophe-neglect sheepishness and this tells me that the possessive apostrophe is on life-support. It won't be long before the apostrophe in contractions joins it and "Our Visions Your Vision. Were going places".

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If we're going to lose a punctuation mark to neglect, I demand another be instated. Perhaps the interrobang, a typographical merger of the question mark and exclamation mark, would lend itself to Facebook status updates, tweets and texts in a way that the apostrophe does not. Then I could at least type, You did what on New Years Eve`

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About the Author

Dr Michelle Smith is a postdoctoral fellow in Literary Studies at the University of Melbourne, where she is researching colonial Australian girls' print culture. She blogs at www.girlsliterature.com

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