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

standard.co.uk

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

#71

Post by downerending »

jackjeff wrote: post #35
lacker wrote: post #8

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.

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.

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

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

#73

Post by ginko »

shpx wrote: post #37
neonate wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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"?

tsch or dsch

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

#74

Post by thedaemon »

commandlinefan wrote: post #61

> 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 s…

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.

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

#75

Post by thaumasiotes »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #67
thaumasiotes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

They are not hard to remember, and they add value. Gee it's almost like stating an opinion as though it were a fact is free, and anyone can do it, and it means nothing, and so is a pointless waste of time, which says something about the worth of the insights of whoever does it.

You can clearly see that they are hard to remember by the frequency with which people make errors. That two opinions are stated with the same rhetorical backing doesn't give them the same empirical backing.

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

#76

Post by jfengel »

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.

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

#77

Post by kmm »

mikorym wrote: post #45
lacker wrote: post #8

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.

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.

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".

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

#78

Post by kmm »

vixen99 wrote: post #32
lacker wrote: post #8

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.

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 incur…

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.

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

#79

Post by kmm »

queensnake wrote: post #28

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

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.

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

#80

Post by WilliamEdward »

nkrisc wrote: post #63
WilliamEdward wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What, your keystrokes were streamed to the hiring manager as you typed? Writing is not real-time communication, take the time to review it before you send it. I corrected a few typos while writing this comment.

Mistakes can happen even after proofreading.
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