As much as we might like to ditch the little mark that causes so many errors, I’m afraid the English language is stuck with apostrophes.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw reportedly had no love for the apostrophe. In fact, in several of his plays, he omitted them whenever he could. Shaw called the apostrophe the “uncouth bacilli” of the English language. But whether you agree that the little marks are unsophisticated bacteria, our language is stuck with apostrophes.
When it comes to the frustration that misuse of the apostrophe causes, I can understand the desire to rid the language of them. In fact, there are four rules for using apostrophes correctly. Most people blow past those and insert one when they’re trying to make a word plural — which is exactly where apostrophes don’t belong.
Shaw seemed to hate them far more than most people, however.
In some of his plays, he simply dropped the apostrophe in contractions like don’t and can’t. Contractions, of course, use apostrophes to indicate the writer dropped letters to shorten multiple words into one. In don’t, the apostrophe indicates we dropped the letter O in not and reduced the remaining letters into a single word: from do not to don’t.
I can see that in both cases, the words “dont” and “cant” still read properly, though spellcheck flags them both. If you can get past the lack of the apostrophe, you understand what the word means.
Perhaps some of us could one day accept contractions like that without the little apostrophes.
But certain contractions require them
But we’re stuck with apostrophes because of certain other contractions. Consider contractions like I’ll, she’ll or he’ll.
Without the apostrophe, each spells a completely different word: I’ll becomes ill. She’ll becomes a shell. He’ll becomes hell. So you’d have to use apostrophes part of the time but not all of the time to make Shaw’s notion work.
You’d essentially, then, be turning the apostrophe into the Oxford comma, and I think we have more than enough bickering in that debate to advocate a sometimes-only use of the little apostrophe.
The apostrophe isn’t going anywhere. Nor should it.
