the sarcasm should’ve burned a hole in your monitor 
jjiimm wasn’t talking about the sarcasm in your statement about professors, but the irony of your misuse of an apostrophe in a thread about apostrophes.
I am starting a campaign to rid us of the symbol known as “e”, which is not as important as you might think. My faith is that it will bring about a clarity and concision not known until now.
I don’t know about that. I find a lot of utility in that symbol and count on it as an aid to communication. Difficult to put your thoughts down in writing without it, I’d say.
I can do without, but TGU can’t hold on to his nick if his proposal wins. And his post still contains a ‘the’!
But the feminine possessive was never his, it was always her.
This theory is totally wrong, but it was imagined by 16th-century English grammarians who were ignorant of historical language changes. So they wrote phrases like “The Kinge his horses” which must have sounded just as odd and awkward then as it does now, and the practice was soon dropped. But this does explain why the apostrophe for the possessive was introduced, when it was (erroneously) thought that the masculine pronoun (hi)s was the original form, and the apostrophe was used to replace the imagined missing letters. Before this 16th century innovation, the English possessive had been -s or -es with no apostrophe.
The final -s as possessive or genitive case ending has nothing to do with the pronoun his. It is common to Germanic languages, and in fact it goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European.
For example:
In Old English “hound” was hund in the nominative and the genitive “hound’s” was hundes. (This shows that peter morris was correct in stating that the English possessive ending was originally -es.)
In Proto-Indo-European the genitive ending was *-os, *-es, or *-osyo.
If you’d have posted “a symbol,” rather than “the symbol,” then your campaign would have had an excellent start. There would have been no e’s in your sentences, and the clarity and concision of your statement would surely have convinced everyone.
So close, yet so far…
Damn! And curs’s! My campaign is still in its infancy, an occasional slip cannot allow this mighty vision to fail. Plus, it’s bloody hard, I can inform you, this lipogrammising!
Speaker, please tell me where I can get a PhD in English while ignoring punctuation. I can’t wait to spend up to a whole weekend to earn that degree!
Hey, so I’m 500 years out of date. Won’t somebody give a sucker an even break???