Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/apostrophe-society-shuts-down-because-ignorance-has-won-a4301391.html

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

62 91 7 years ago

standard.co.uk

kizer• 7 years ago

Richard, I swear to carry on you’re cause!

Is 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....

larnmar3• 7 years ago

No. There is something wrong with that headline, but the apostrophe is not it.

fingerlocks3• 7 years ago

The decade has possession of the experience? A decade of worth is also correct, sans the possessive noun.

praptak2• 7 years ago

Is it not a correct use of the apostrophe to denote possession?

Stratoscope2• 7 years ago

Yes, 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• 7 years ago

Its 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.

larnmar3• 7 years ago

Language 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• 7 years ago

Moreover, 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?

neonate3• 7 years ago

Your comment reminds me of this classic: http://ashvital.freeservers.com/ze_dream.htm

shpx• 7 years ago

In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c".
Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.

How would you type "ch"?

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

The difference between plural and possessive can matter greatly, e.g. decade's (belonging to the particular decade discussed) and decades (more than one decade), etc.

lordnacho• 7 years ago

It can, but it's not like having some special rule fixes all confusion. Mostly confusion is solved by having some larger context, not by nitpicky rules.

You could do like in German and force everyone to capitalise nouns. I'm sure there are German grammar pedants who have some reason why that's a good idea, too.

Or clarify that a sentence is a question by making everyone do the upside down "?" sign to wrap the question inside of, like Spanish.

vixen99• 7 years ago

Clarity or confusion? George Bernard Shaw back in 1900 promoted the same idea and his writing was full of its (the abbreviation) and Ives and cant. It still hasn't happened for good reason and most people follow the rules.

With some expressions, those who don't, against the grain, force their readers to double check the parsing. The cost may be only a millisecond or two but it is nevertheless a tiny distraction incurred because someone can't be bothered to follow a simple rule taught in primary school. In the glorious future envisaged in the comment, everyone will ignore the apostrophe so all of us will have to do a bit of extra scanning. What's superior about that?

Is it really that difficult to remember that the apostrophe in it's (for instance), is always without exception used as an abbreviation for 'it is' or 'it has', not an indication of possession and thus your's is wrong.

Izkata• 7 years ago

Is it really that difficult to remember that the apostrophe in it's (for instance), is always without exception used as an abbreviation for 'it is' or 'it has', not an indication of possession and thus your's is wrong.

From someone who had issues with this for years, just parroting the rule as you did doesn't help, it only made sense after learning the reason why: the possessive form "its" is grouped with "his" and "hers", not "vixen99's" and "Izkata's".

kmm3• 7 years ago

It wouldn't take any more parsing because we'd be used to it. Dutch doesn't have the apostrophe for the possessive (except where a word ends in a vowel, where the rule is opposite to English! At least I have a good excuse for not keeping them straight). Languages are both in writing and in speech inherently immensely ambiguous, something as trivial as whether or not the possessive has an apostrophe will never make the difference. Speakers and writers subconsciously work around it.

yesenadam• 7 years ago

With some expressions, those who don't, against the grain, force their readers to double check the parsing.

Speaking of clarity vs confusion, and forcing readers to double check parsing! Muphry strikes again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

jackjeff2• 7 years ago

Anecdotally I found there is a high correlation between one’s ability to write correct English and one’s ability to write correct code. If I’m in the hiring side and I see a “its” vs “it’s” mistake it counts against you.

A higher correlation is with consistency in spacing. The worst coders I met are the one who keep changing the rules about how many spaces they leave after commas and brackets... within the same file.

WilliamEdward3• 7 years ago

Glad to know the difference between me having money to survive and being jobless will be a typo.

im3w1l2• 7 years ago

Consider automatically enforcing your preferred code style.

guiraldelli• 7 years ago

Anecdotally I found there is a high correlation between one’s ability to write correct English and one’s ability to write correct code.

I have been thinking a long time about it and I concluded it is about one being methodical.

A methodic person tends to put extra attention on (all) the tasks they perform, as well as they are more critic to correctness, and those features combined might make them “better programmers”.

specialist• 7 years ago

I was once asked by a high school principle why programmers were such terrible writers.

I replied that all the good programmers I know are also good writers. That if you can write an essay, you can code. Because it's all just organizing your thoughts and communication.

Best job interview I ever had asked me to bring writing samples (not just code).

downerending• 7 years ago

The spacing thing is absolutely baffling. It's actually more work to get it wrong.

OrderlyTiamat• 7 years ago

I think you're on to something. I'd bet it is correlated with a person's conscientiousness score. The higher score would both mean less spelling mistakes and tidier code.

DoreenMichele• 7 years ago

I'm visually impaired, among other things. I make some of my money doing freelance writing and I also know a little HTML and CSS.

I refer to editing my own writing as "cleaning" it, an expression borrowed from programming.

It's a pain in the ass for me because of my issues, but the computer or human reader equally don't care. So I just work at it and layer in extra steps.

nwallin2• 7 years ago

I recently integrated clang format into my editor for my personal projects. It is physically impossible for me to write code that isn't formatted to a consistent style. I don't even like what the default style is, but that doesn't matter, because it's consistent.

It's made me substantially better as a programmer in my personal projects. I'm typing word salad into the editor, and if it formats it wrong I know I've fucked up and need to fix it. It's comparable to the point in my programmer life I decided that every time I declared a variable I would ask myself whether or not I could make it const, and if I couldn't, why not.

It's made me worse at my day job, where all of a sudden I think of formatting as a purely output mechanism, where my tooling says "I think you mean this", but in my work environment it's an I/O mechanism.

It will be twenty years before I have enough clout at my day job to enforce a uniform coding standard.

jaclaz• 7 years ago

Anecdotally as well, this extends to other fields besides programming/writing code, though personally I define it as the contrary, i.e. someone that writes "sloppily" (without proper grammar, with typos, etc.) will also work "sloppily", no matter the specific work, paricularly when some "team effort" is needed.

I suspect that at the base there is somehow a lack in communication skills and "education", or more generally a lack of respect for otherwise agreed conventions (grammar and spelling when writing) that is corresponding to a same lack of respect for other people or for the specific conventions/rules that apply to the specific work.

mantap• 7 years ago

ThesamegoesforspacesbutIdon'tthink anybodywouldarguethatwe shouldstopusingthem.

mikorym2• 7 years ago

You comment does not give any argument behind it.

If both "it's" and "its" are merged, what, do you also propose merging "weather", "whether"?

Weather that is nice, is nice weather.

kmm3• 7 years ago

The words weather and whether are only rarely mixed up naturally, in contrast to apostrophes.

And even if they were, why not? The pronunciations have already merged, the only reason they're still distinct is because of the immense historical legacy English is carrying around. In Dutch, a sister of English, they're both written "weer".

72deluxe• 7 years ago

Indeed it is simpler but it changes the meaning of a sentence quite significantly. Correct syntax is important - should I be able to write my C++ without semicolons too?

Next you'll be arguing that we should use "brought" and "bought" interchangeably because they sound similar enough (and it seems everyone I hear thinks they're the same anyway even though they have wildly different meanings).

Udik• 7 years ago

I heard you're idea's and their definatly good.

rosstex• 7 years ago

Whomst'd've?

King-Aaron• 7 years ago

I am'nt

sterlind2• 7 years ago

alternatively, "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• 7 years ago

Ironic that he doesn’t use contractions in the quoted from the announcement.

queensnake• 7 years ago

Possessive is also contraction: "x's" <- "xes" <- "x his". No citation, but I read that somewhere. Interesting that it started out so primitive-seeming.

kmm3• 7 years ago

I'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.

ImaCake2• 7 years ago

My 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• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years ago

I 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.

solarkraft• 7 years ago

There 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• 7 years ago

The Title should have been "Apostrophe Society Shut's Down..."

ChainOfFools• 7 years ago

Im surprised this isnt the top comment. Beautiful compression!

mikorym2• 7 years 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.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

Really 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.

commandlinefan2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Fair, 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• 7 years ago

What 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.

Gunax• 7 years ago

It'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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

very few linguists are prescriptivists. Grammatical rules have always (only) emerged from use, and language is expected to evolve through the decades.

jfengel• 7 years ago

I'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• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years 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!

Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

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