The Apostrophe’s In Danger | Flash Post 389

Button, the apostrophe’s in danger and guardians of the English language are throwing up their hands in sheer frustration.

What are you talking about?

The apostrophe. Stay focused.

Give me an example.

A glaring one is Anu’s Kitchen! What would it be without the apostrophe?

What?

Come on, Button! You’re not that stupid.

Good Lord! I get it now.

That’s not the only example of misuse of punctuations marks. Unnecessary quotation marks are used when nothing is being quoted, commas go missing, too many commas creep in, too many exclamation marks are used devaluing each individual exclamation, it’s is used in place of its, the hyphen (-) in place of the dash (—), semi-colons are used where colons are meant to be and placement of quotation marks are erroneous.

Are you guilty of any of the above?

I am in the habit of using too many commas and exclamation marks. With the evolution of language, an army of grammar guardians, bound by their commitment to clauses, commas and capitals, have been working to present the written word at its finest.

Interesting.

Over the years, “invite” became a noun, “like” became a button, one could be woke and still sleep as long as one liked. But, as long as there were “tweeples” explaining the difference between “your” and “you’re”, there seemed to be hope. Or so one thought. Last week, the London-based Apostrophe Protection Society (APS) announced it was shutting down. Founder John Richards, a 96-year old former journalist, said he couldn’t take the shocking abuse of the punctuation mark any more. “The barbarians have won”, he said. Traffic on the APS website have risen 600 times since.

That’s sad. Will it get dropped eventually?

Who can tell?