I agree - there’s no fixing it; reforming spelling to try make it consistent with pronunciation is another one (and that one is pointless because there is no standard pronunciation)
I agree with you on that one too - I break that rule on purpose.
No - if anything we’re overstocked on apostrophes, and we are dealing with the surplus by dropping them in where they don’t belong. I saw a roadside sign for a Caf’e the other day; I stopped to look at the menu and they were offering Petit Four’s - as well as the usual Tea’s, Coffee’s and Sandwich’s
Eliminating them from a single document would be really easy, and that’s the level I’m talking about.
Let’s see…
Tpau?
Nope. Moving on.
Me, too. And you can quote me on that.
Hows about we get rid of “whom”. I am hearing respected journalists on NPR use “who” where it should be “whom” all the time. I think the train has left the station on that one, and we should codify it into law. Whom is with me on that?
Aww, now I quite like whom. I’m not sure I know how to use it properly, but I like hearing elderly ladies say it.
Which reminds me of an exchange between Matt Lucas and Stephen Fry on an episode of QI. It was directly after Fry had pulled someone else up on a minor grammatical infraction.
ML: Knock knock
SF: Who’s there?
ML: Doctor
SF: Doctor Who?
ML: That should be Doctor Whom, actually
^ Cute.
The apostrophe only has two jobs–poor fellow–contractions and possessives. It is those GD "S"s that have to go.
(Sorry, my blood sugar is low.)
There’s a lot of anal bs in traditional English grammar. I’m very happy to see it evolve and modernize. Writing is an essential tool. It’s not a game of gotcha.
I haven’t used Whom or Shall in a sentence since College English. It’s guaranteed someone will bitch it’s used wrong.
It’s a bit silly to put words in a language that nearly everyone misuses. Creating a word trap for people to fail. Fuck it then. I’ll use a different word. I got better things to do then worry about who or whom.
Commas and apostrophes are easy. Imho Although I’m sure there are people that get worked over the slightest misuse.
As a cranky pedant, I feel compelled to point out that eliminating people who misuse apostrophes also solves the problem.
The “caf’e” is probably just a Brexit accent. We’re just not importing any of that funny foreign punctuation any more. We already have a critical shortage of cedillas and umlauts.
…
And now we have the world’s first case of proposed mass linguisticide.
Stranger
I strongly doubt it’s the first.
Definitely not true. English only has about 1 bit of entropy per character; you can eliminate any single character and almost all text is still decipherable, and the locations of the missing characters are easy to spot. For example, the following text has really only one reasonably ambiguous word, and it’s still pretty guessable from context, yet I’ve done away with the most common english letter. Should we conclude then that we could do without Es because we can still figure things out?
Popl ar lft grasping for ways a missing apostroph could be mislading. But so many popl (and this board is full of them) can spy (and point out) missing apostrophs with as. If thir absnc wr truly confusing, w wouldn’t b abl to spot thir absnc so asily
Today I learned that Cormac McCarthy is a Doper.
Because my name is D’Artagnan R’lyeh, I have a personal investment in this, and will pigheadedly resist it. Though it will make it would save me countless time to not constantly have to edit website registrations when it tells me I’m using “invalid characters.”
No, it’s not. Because that document will then be seen as being full of mistakes. You are advocating willfully changing centuries of history of English orthography. Far more useful changes have been tried and failed, because you can’t change a language that way.
I know some people make mistakes with apostrophes. That’s not a bad thing. It is useful to be able to identify those who cannot understand the convention or don’t care to bother with it. It’s even useful to catch how often one makes typographical errors.
I’ll be honest–I assumed from the OP that you were just facetiously expressing your frustration with the mistakes. Surely you don’t actually think this is something that is doable, right?
[del]As an apostrophed[/del] [del]As an apostrophe’d[/del] [del]As an apostrofied[/del] Yeah I know what you mean. Keep up the good fight.
I’m sure that’s what they were aiming for, but the sign actually said (in block caps): CAF’E
when I type
[C][a][f][‘][e]
this is the result:
Café
[C][A][F][’][E]
CAFÉ
in Chrome on Win 10, US international keyboard