Michigan Today - October 2007

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Talking about words

What's the point?

by Richard W. Bailey

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Radical changes are afoot in the punctuation department. Canadians (and some foreigners) know that the largest city in New Brunswick is St. John and the largest in Newfoundland is St. John's. These are distinct, both in pronunciation and appearance. They're tidy. Nice. Canadian. More power to 'em.

But look at Bellow's Falls, Vermont, and you discover it is now called Bellows Falls. The Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute has likewise lost its apostrophe.

Mount St. Helens in Washington seems to have blown off the apostrophe when the summit exploded in 1980.

The webpage for St. Paul's Cathedral in London has the apostrophe, but the links connecting to subsidiary information have St Pauls.

The great advocate for abolishing the apostrophe was George Bernard Shaw, who, in Pygmalion (the basis for the musical My Fair Lady) spelled can't cant and he's hes. Shaw was much more interested in the sound of language than the look of it and left a bequest to support creating an entirely phonetic alphabet for English. Thanks to the hefty sum accumulated from his posthumous royalties, somebody did create such an alphabet—one provision was that it not contain any characters from the Roman alphabet. Nearly five hundred people composed alphabets. A book was published using the winner and it was promptly forgotten.

Assuming they own the language, British people have carted out traditional punctuation to the rubbish tip by the barrow load—not just apostrophes but all sorts of other marks as well. PhD, Esq, and MD, in Britain, have no conventional stops perhaps on the argument of economy. (We saved five marks among just those three). One label I get on an envelope from England addresses me, compactly, as RWBailey. There is no comma between city and county name: Chelmsford Essex. NewcastleonTyne used to have hyphens—Newcastle-on-Tyne—but it doesn't any more. Stratford-upon-Avon is drifting in the same direction. One can easily imagine what will become of ne'er-do-well: just look at what has already happened to fo'c'sle and nor'easter.

But now one Briton has decided to fight back. John Richards, a retired British journalist, founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001. Its motto is simple: "The little apostrophe deserves our protection. It is indeed a threatened species!" Of course, there is little hope that he will prevail, despite the more-than-a-million hits on his website. He deals with the simple cases like "No Dog's," a hand-painted sign on the lawn next to the ferry dock in Detour, Michigan. He doesn't begin to address the names like St. Georges Hospital Tooting London, since he vents his spleen at apostrophes that don't belong rather than getting worked up about the ones that are missing. Hyphenicide, a word lately coined, doesn't come within his remit.

Let's step back from the fray a moment. When Shakespeare's comedy Love's Labours Lost was published in 1598, its title page said Loues Labors Lost. John Richards would probably fret not just about the apostrophe but about the "American" spelling of labor. (Of course there weren't any American spellers of English in 1598 so there must be some other explanation.)

There's nothing especially new in the tumult surrounding English writing practices. In the Bill of Rights, the word Congress has the "long ess" as second to the last letter. This is not, as some have imagined, an eff, but an ess character used where the two final letters of a word are esses. Probably a lot of people regretted letting go of it.

What can be done about all these changes? Nothing.

Of course some of us get great pleasure from complaining about them.

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Richard W. Bailey is Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn/