Yesterday, grammar nerds of the United States celebrated National Punctuation Day.
The little-known, but much appreciated holiday marked its 10th year. The official website (NationalPunctuationDay.com) proudly states this the holiday’s purpose is to celebrate under appreciated, and misused marks such as the semicolon and ellipsis.
It may sound like a bit of overly dramatic prose from some English majors with too much free times on their hands, but in reality punctuation does need to be appreciated and is under constant attack from the under-informed Tweeter, Facebook-er and casual Internet commenter.
In belated celebration of the holiday, I though I’d dedicate today’s post to one of my favorite misunderstood punctuation mark—the apostrophe.
In the age of the Tweets and texts, this poor possessive punctuation mark gets misplaced and more often than not, forgotten completely.
Even worse, those who do not understand it are constantly working to wipe it from existence. There’s even a website (killtheapostrophe.com).
Why must there be so much blind hatred? Just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. The apostrophe has two very clear purposes:
- To indicate the omission of letters from a word or contraction: example – o’er = over; it’s = it is
- To indicate possession: example – Zer’s argument in defense of the apostrophe
Is that really that difficult to remember?
It’s hard to imagine a world without the apostrophe. In fact, this sentence couldn’t exist without the apostrophe’s ability to replace and possess. We can only hope we’ll never have to know a world without it.
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More on the Story: Brandwatch.com
…just for fun:
