Well, really, no usages require apostrophes for clarity. If they did, spoken English would have a way of distinguishing between apostrophized and non-apostrophized words. But it doesn’t — “cats” and “cat’s” are pronounced identically, as are “can’t” and “cant”.
The only exception I can think of is the possessive form of words ending in s — “Gus’s” is pronounced differently from “guss”. But it’s pronounced just about the same as “gusses”. So we could just drop the apostrophe entirely, spell possessives the same way we do plurals (add “s” for most words, “es” if the word otherwise ends in “s”), and rely on context to tell the difference, just like we do in speech, with no loss of clarity.
All we’d lose is the opportunity to feel superior about our knowledge of an irrelevant rule of punctuation.
Clarity is never required, I suppose, but more clarity is generally helpful. When used correctly, apostrophes help differentiate between things that are less differentiable (?) without them. When used incorrectly, they can make things more confusing. (An analogy with comments in programming immediately springs to mind.) Wouldn't it be better to have them used correctly than to do away with them entirely?
Clarity should be handled at the composition level — vocabulary and sentence structure. If you have to rely upon an apostrophe to make your sentence clear, you’ve built the sentence badly. (And what will you do if you have to read it out loud?)
In real life I’ve never once seen somebody honestly misread a sentence because an apostrophe was missing, or present when it shouldn’t have been. The actual reaction people always have, if they notice it at all, is more like Hah hah, an apostrophe error, whoever wrote that is stoopid! (or, alternatively, Arg, a stoopid apostrophe error, I hate that!). The actual intended meaning is always clear.
It's often the bellwether that the rest of the writing will have grammatical problems. As un unreconstructed apostrofascist, I find I have a more adversarial relationship with texts that fall down on this rule. I read them defensively, expecting at any time to have to stop my train of thought, repair the damaged trestle to the state the careless construction crew thought they left it in (based on my best guess), and attempt to get up a good head of steam for the rest of the trip. Like a ridiculously extended metaphor, sometimes it's not worth the bother.
On the other hand, I read Eats, shoots, and leaves about a week after I'd removed a rogue apostrophe from a bar's chalkboard advertisement about a block from my place in Jersey City, so I might be somewhat biased on the subject of The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation...
Well, sure, most people who can write well have internalized some sort of consistent version of the apostrophe rules (there’s a lack of consensus about certain matters, like plurals of words that aren’t usually pluralized, or plurals of acronyms, or the possessive forms of famous names of antiquity). And most people who haven’t internalized these rules are bad writers on the compositional level. But not all. There are quite a few authors who routinely fall down on matters of spelling or punctuation; that’s why publishers hire copy editors.
What I’m saying is if we all just agreed to stop with the damn apostrophes already, and gave ourselves a few decades to get used to it, we’d all be better off. For those few decades I’d be twitching just as much as you would.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mcroft
no subject
Date: 2006-06-27 03:02 am (UTC)The only exception I can think of is the possessive form of words ending in s — “Gus’s” is pronounced differently from “guss”. But it’s pronounced just about the same as “gusses”. So we could just drop the apostrophe entirely, spell possessives the same way we do plurals (add “s” for most words, “es” if the word otherwise ends in “s”), and rely on context to tell the difference, just like we do in speech, with no loss of clarity.
All we’d lose is the opportunity to feel superior about our knowledge of an irrelevant rule of punctuation.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-27 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 01:05 am (UTC)In real life I’ve never once seen somebody honestly misread a sentence because an apostrophe was missing, or present when it shouldn’t have been. The actual reaction people always have, if they notice it at all, is more like Hah hah, an apostrophe error, whoever wrote that is stoopid! (or, alternatively, Arg, a stoopid apostrophe error, I hate that!). The actual intended meaning is always clear.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 01:28 am (UTC)On the other hand, I read Eats, shoots, and leaves about a week after I'd removed a rogue apostrophe from a bar's chalkboard advertisement about a block from my place in Jersey City, so I might be somewhat biased on the subject of The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation...
no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 02:18 am (UTC)What I’m saying is if we all just agreed to stop with the damn apostrophes already, and gave ourselves a few decades to get used to it, we’d all be better off. For those few decades I’d be twitching just as much as you would.