We had a bit of fun on the BBC Seven Days programme last month on the subject of Waterstones deciding to drop the apostrophe in its name. Is this language change gone mad (or even ‘went’ mad, see last week‘s article)?
Even the mighty Belfast Telegraph, on the Bard’s Day of all days, said Alex Salmond was setting out his parties plans for independence (I was not aware the SNP had split into more than one party – but then, of course, he wasn’t even doing what the headline suggested, but rather setting out plans for the referendum consultation, so the whole thing was careless).
I take the view that there are far worse sins than omitting an apostrophe (like getting the singular wrong, as above). The apostrophe is a false insertion anyway, coming from a time when self-appointed “experts” thought it was short for “his” [in fact, it is an old genitive marker still present in other Germanic languages - without the apostrophe!]
Similar self-appointed experts are also responsible for such daft spellings as “island” (nothing to do with the Latin, in fact), “debt” (quoque) and “align” (despite “line”). This is what happens when such an “elite” takes over – they tend to make individual human mistakes and thus de-regularise a social construct, often precisely the reverse of what they intended. The various Spanish language academies have now settled on being more descriptive and are beginning to regain some respect; L’Academie Francaise continues to lose battles over the gender of ministers or the use of obviously more efficient Anglicisms such as “week-end”.
That is not to say, however, that a loss of academic rigour when it comes to accurate use of written Standards is a good thing. It is a very bad thing. What seems to have happened is that the pendulum has shifted from promoting universal use of an alien and somewhat pompous Upper Class speech form in every type of writing to allowing an absolute free-for-all with formal exams written in textspeak!
In fact, what is required is a re-assessment of what language is for. Textspeak can be beautiful, creative, ingenious – but its [there's that old genitive again, no apostrophe on pronouns for some reason, but we all understand it!] use should be limited to familiar, informal settings. Standard English as per the Oxford Dictionary or the London Times can also be beautiful, creative and ingenious – but there is no point in enforcing it on a Geordie enjoying a quiet pint in the pub. The great beauty of language is precisely its variety – formal versus informal, familiar versus distant, written versus spoken, communicative versus creative.
There is no reason for us to artificially stop splitting infinitives, to force ourselves to include apostrophes towards our 140-character limit in tweets, or indeed to insist that prepositions are words we should never end a sentence with. We are right to remove the prejudice against people daring to pronounce “bath” with a Northern English as opposed to an RP accent. However, stopping the anti-academic free-for-all and indeed outright laziness which accompanies modern language use and teaching would be a good thing.
