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Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#22Ironic that he doesn’t use contractions in the quoted from the announcement.
Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it not a correct use of the apostrophe to denote possession?
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.
Agreed but I was referring specifically to the title. Its only apostrophe is the one in "decade's", which seems correct to me.
Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 ?
> otherwise what's stopping us from devolving all the way back to scriptura continua?
The facts that
1. People once trained generally do not have a problem identifying word boundaries. There are edge cases, but for whatever reason they don't tend to cause problems.
2. People overwhelmingly agree that marking of word boundaries in text is useful.
Neither of those is true for apostrophes. They're hard for people to remember even after being trained, and they add no value.
Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#25Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agreed but I was referring specifically to the title. Its only apostrophe is the one in "decade's", which seems correct to me.
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Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agreed but I was referring specifically to the title. Its only apostrophe is the one in "decade's", which seems correct to me.
Ah, we were talking about two different articles, sorry for the mixup. I was thinking of the Apostrophe Society article, which calls out "it's" vs. "its".
Yes, of course the use of "Decade's" is correct in the article title you're referring to.
Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#28Possessive is also contraction: "x's" <- "xes" <- "x his". No citation, but I read that somewhere. Interesting that it started out so primitive-seeming.
Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#29My 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?
Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'
#30My 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 dispa…
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