The tired and dated apostrophe has served English well for centuries. It helps people understand new words that are joined together. The first time can not became can’t may have caused consternation for older readers. BTW, when was that conjunction first created? Seventy-five years ago? A hundred years ago? Maybe even longer?
Isn’t it time to drop the apostrophe ? Everybody that reads English already knows how to read the word cant. Yes, I wrote it as a word. It holds the meaning of the phrase* can not.*
Would society suffer if we simply treated older and established conjunctions as words? Drop the apostrophe please.
Now, be honest. Is there any confusion in writing shouldnt? Didn’t you read it as a word just like you normally read shouldn’t? Who translates conjunctions as they read anyway? Johnny shouldn’t be late. Lets see, that means Johnny should not be late. Who reads and translates like that? I’m not aware of anyone beyond second grade that has to translate a conjunction into separate words.
Can we please ditch the apostrophe in common conjunctions? Havent they earned the right to be stand alone words? Do they still need an apostrophe to explain their meaning?
*Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?
Conjunction Junction, how’s that function?
I got three favorite cars
That get most of my job done.
Conjunction Junction, what’s their function?
I got “and”, “but”, and “or”,
They’ll get you pretty far.
*
If you can’t figure out which one is meant in the sentence “I won’t abide you speaking that thieves’ cant in my house.” the apostrophe is not going to save you.
Well, at one time they served a purpose, many folks didnt use them in polite correspondence.
They no longer serve any real purpose.
True, “cant” as in “Thieves cant” is spelled the same as “can’t” but it’s a rare word, and there are scads of words in the English language with the same spelling but different meaning.
English evolves and changes over time. I always felt that contractions were supposed to be temporary until the word entered common usage.
It’s exactly the same logic in getting rid of dashes. A lot of words get joined by dashes and eventually they become stand alone words. We’ve all seen hyphenated words that eventually dropped the dash.
Think of the wear and tear on our hands typing apostrophes several hundred times a day. Carpal tunnel made me leave programming and go into computer hardware support. Waking up with pin pricks in my hands was the first warning sign. Then your fingers just feel numb like they are asleep. Thank goodness I found a new job before the damage was permanent. Why type hundreds of extra keystrokes needlessly? It makes no sense.
In this case, meh, chances are context will reveal a lot since some of them are words, like cant mentioned upthread and also wont. But my main complaint would be that if we’re going to make a change, it should either be neutral or even positive toward our ability to understand eachother, or add enough convenience to offset the confusion. In this case, we’re talking about removing one tiny character, so the added convenience is small, but now we’ll confuse some swords, so it seems like a wash to me.
Worse though, the apostraphe will still be needed in some situations, notably for possessives. That’s quite common usage, and while it can probably be sussed out from context, it seems like unnecessary effort, and we’ll definitely have ambiguity when dealing with plural possessives. If we’re going to keep it for this purpose, why not keep it for contractions?
That’s exactly the point I’m making. We’re all trapped typing these useless apostrophes hundreds of times a day because of outdated grammar rules. No one wants to appear illiterate.
Modify the rules. Make the apostrophe optional. I’d be willing to bet in twenty years the majority of the younger generation won’t be using them.
Look! I had to type four apostrophes in just this one tiny posting.
From the rules for hyphens. Even the venerable Oxford dictionary admits their usage is declining. Look at the section on compound nouns. The hyphen is optional but consistency is important. Don’t write play-ground and playground in the same document.
Oops.