Wednesday, August 25, 2004
(6:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Punctuation Post
My favorite punctuation mark is the colon. I feel as though I'm the only person still using it on a regular basis, but there was a time when the colon contributed to a period of unprecedented punctuational richness. Simply read Hawthorne and note the nuance he is able to produce through the varied use of punctuation: his colons and semicolons where we would place a simple, undifferentiated period. I used to dismiss Hawthorne as unnecessarily verbose, but there is a beauty to be found there.In blogging, I try to make my sentences shorter, but my first impulse is always to lengthen it, turning a paragraph into a river of words.
I agree with this ancient Calpundit post (back when he was still the humble "Calpundit"): the apostrophe should be abolished. Quoth Kevin (I'm on a first-name basis with him, because we both have blogs):
The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused, a fact that ought to be self evident since spoken language seems to get along just fine even though it has never evolved a verbal cue to indicate an apostrophe. (As opposed to commas, periods, and paragraphs, for example, which are marked verbally by various kinds of pauses.)I cannot think of any possible situation in which it would be unclear whether a word ending in "s" was plural, singular possessive, or plural possessive without the apostrophe. Furthermore, I think that the various frequently-confused words such as there-their-they're or your-you're should be flattened out into one word: their and your, respectively. Again, there is no possible situation in which it would be unclear which meaning was intended -- never in conversation have I ever had to clarify whether I meant "there as in location" or "they're as in the contraction."
So go ahead and learn to use apostrophes correctly. It will save you from being thought an uneducated boor. But as my mother the English major contends, if it's meaning we're concerned about we could just get rid of it altogether.
In our postmodern global village, maintaining these antiquated spelling and punctuation conventions is simply inhospitable to the many people who are going to have to learn English as a second language. The next step, of course, would be a thorough-going spelling reform that would make English into a truly phonetic language like Italian. We have a mutt language, and we carry around that heritage every day in what amounts to a dozen separate spelling and punctuation systems. Especially literate native speakers get an unconscious feel for what the words in a certain class (vaguely German, kind of French, etc.) look like and how they should be pronounced, so that the intellectual elites never really have trouble, but our haphazard system of spelling adds up to wasted time in the classroom, the farcical spectacle of spelling bees (unknown in the rest of the civilized world!), and deep-seated feelings of inferiority among those who are "no good at spelling."
The time is ripe! If we do not abolish the apostrophe and move to a complete overhaul of the English spelling system, future generations will look back at us with scorn and pity.
