Minneapolis Woman Launches Campaign to End Apostrophe Abuse
Yesterday David (the other clerk) and I were at the office fairly late and we saw a resume that the hiring partner had left at the reception desk. I instantly saw two misplaced apostrophes on the resume. Are you kidding me? Sure, I've been known to get pretty worked up about apostrophe abuse in general (actually, I think Zander coined the term "ApostroNazi" to describe my disposition toward misused apostrophes) but I don't expect people to be perfect. I make grammar mistakes, too. But come on. You can't have grammar problems on your resume. Here's the best part--one of the misused apostrophes was in a sentence describing her work editing a publication. I nearly died laughing. David and I took out a red pen and corrected all the grammar errors.
Apostophe abuse drives me crazy. I can handle it on the small scale--e-mail, blogs, simple correspondence. It makes me itch a little bit, but no big deal. But it makes me wild when I pass a restaurant with a neon sign advertising Margarita's, or--this recently happened--a cake decorated to say Congratulation's. Seriously. Start paying attention and I promise you will encounter several instances of apostrophe abuse every day.
Okay, so you're thinking I'm a big jerk for marking up the resume. But this woman was applying for a job where you have to have the utmost attention to detail. As I see it, the attorney's job is to do all the brilliant work, and then the legal assistants have to polish it up and check the crappy little details (e.g. citations and grammar)--we look at it last before it goes out the door. If you can't pay close enough attention to make sure the simplest grammar details aren't fixed on your own resume, how could you be trusted to send decent correspondence to clients or the court? Call me a snob, I don't care.
Actually, as long as I'm already being a jerk, I might as well just go off on my holiday greeting card rant. Every year I cringe as the cards come in, riddled with apostrophe abuse. Don't feel bad, almost everyone does it. But we all learned about plurals and possessives in about third grade, and the rules still apply. People love to put apostrophe + s when they sign their names. There's no reason for it, people! It's wrong! You're not possessing anything! You're not a contraction! So just sign, "The Smiths"--ok? "The Smith's"= wrong. Actually, I blame the printers down at the photo lab. When people are getting their holiday photo cards printed up, the lab attendants are in the best position to spot this problem and advise repeated abusers accordingly. As I see it, they have a duty to intervene to prevent apostrophe abuse just like school teachers need to report child abuse. Okay, but I love the cards, please don't stop sending them and by the way I'm sorry I didn't get any cards sent this year.
Sarah just called to inform me that our mom bought DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION. Yes, that's right, the Japanese game you've seen at the arcade. The one where you have to move your feet on certain squares to the beat of hyper hip hop discotech whatever. Apparently you can buy a mat to put on the floor and plug it into your TV and it's like having the game in your own home. Oh, my.
I'm going to take a look at my resume now and make sure it doesn't have any grammar mistakes.
posted by Ugly Juice @ 7:40 PM
16 comments
16 Comments:
Anna, it's great that I can check out your blog and find out what's been going at school (cranky security guards) or what you've been ranting about lately (misbehaving apostrophes). I feel like I've been AWOL from the school and library because of my out of town guests, but Ugly Juice keeps me in the loop. By the way, I'm completely paranoid about sending you any sort of written communication for fear that you're sitting there with a red pen, ready to attack and laugh at it.
Go at it.
-s.
P.S. The swap was totally awesome! Kerrie and I had a great time! She's going to have one in Iowa City too :-)
I abuse apostrophe’s because they LIKE IT ANNA. Apostrophes are cheap, dirty, little sluts who just really enjoy being misused – it just increases their sentence time and get’s them out in the general public’s eye’s.
See! Those 4 up there are happy. I made them happy, I tell you.
Should that have been censored?
Ugh. I knew this was going to happen. Don't be afraid of me correcting your grammar. Listen, you can go ahead and abuse the apostrophes on my blog, in email, and in the privacy of your own home. Just don't do it if you're (1) applying for a job that requires proper grammar; (2) working at a job that requires proper grammar; or (3) putting something in print. I can appreciate the fact that other people have better things to do than obsess about grammar. Go ahead! Abuse the English language! See if I care.
Oh, I'm so itchy. Itchy.
I would venture to say that someone from 100 years ago would be horrified at what we consider correct Grammar or English language. Things change. Language evolves -- mostly from laziness and ignorance, but it happens. Deal. Or start learning the King's English.
"DEAL"? Are you telling me to "DEAL"?!?! Listen, I can appreciate the evolution of language to include a word like "google" as a verb, for example. But what we're dealing with here is grammar polution, people. The incessant, gratuitous apostrophe use has no place in the natural evolution of the English language. At the risk of alienating those of you who are now totally afraid of having me correct your grammar, I need to posit this analogy. We need the English language to communicate just like we need air to breathe. The pervasive grammar problems are polluting the English language. I can appreciate that people need to puff an occasional cigarette, for example, so go ahead and misuse a comma every now and then if you need to do it. But excessive smoking will lead to lung cancer, excessive pollution leads to smog, and excessive grammar abuse leads to the bastardization of the very thing we need to communicate properly. If people continue to violate our language there will be even more miscommunication than there currently is.
Sincerely Yours,
The ApostoNazi
A slut? Pollution? Please, you are all blaming the victim here, who did nothing wrong. As my uncle on the farm says, apostrophes don't kill, periods do. The apostrophe is humble, shunted off to the far right on the keyboard, not even getting a choice spot up top with the symbol gang. Sure, it doesn't suffer like the front slash or find itself ignored or humiliated like the umlat, but it has feelings, people! Real feelings. Any more dumping on the humble apostrophe and I'm going to contact PETA for some direct action. You ain't seen civil disobedience like letting loose the apostrophe. And need I mention its close association with the colon and his half-breed son semi-colon?
Anna - I have recommendation for some light Spring Break reading that's right up your ally - "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation." If you haven't already heard of this, I'm sure you and Lynne Truss, the author, will get along smashingly. It's sold at Costco.
Enjoy!
-s.
Again, I'm sure the same argument was used when people started writing the letter s without it looking like a fancy cursive f on our e. I'm sure the same argument was used when people started using the word "you" or "your" in place of "thou" or "art" incorrectly. And when ain't entered the dictionary.
Technology will change language, too. Input device limitations, globalization. Who knows -- we may start putting crazy upside-down question marks at the beginning of sentences -- I'm *so* looking forward to that...
You may judging people based on rules that were communicated to you in the 20 year span of your schooling. Who's to say that snapshot in time of rules is the correct one to go by? Would you be okay with octegenarians lambasting you for rules that were taught in 1904 that aren't used any longer? Or that the set of rules in 1850 is the correct one?
Yes, we do need some base set of organizational rules to help structure our communication, and and an implicit standard, so that we don'have to translate infinite combinations of garbled sentences. If we hadn't come up with a set of guidelines to organize our thoughts and document them, we'd still be drawing pictures on cave walls. But think of the rules as a living document that will reflect society, not regulate it.
I am not trying to regulate society by holding them to the simple rules of grammar that have fostered proper communication between human beings for thousands of years. Moreover, I'd be happy to answer to your hypothetical octegenarian about the grammar rules of 1904, and I won't even pick on you about your math. I'm talking about ABUSE of grammar, not EVOLUTION.
The evolution of language occurs when it is necessary to simplify or clarify understanding of written language. "Thou" and "art" evolved in the oral language and this entered the written language. But people aren't misusing apostrophes in the oral language, they can't. Your proposal to allow the gratuitous use of apostrophes in the written language serves only to simplify things for the writer by eliminating the need for him or her to think about whether or not an apostrophe is appropriate. Our language will NEVER evolve to the point where it is satisfactory to throw apostrophes around all willy-nilly. You attempt to position yourself as a revolutionary, but your cause serves only to confuse (and pollute).
I cannot look at rules as a living thing that will reflect society. There are too many ways of speaking to force the rules to reflect society. There needs to be a strict, objective standard to adhere to. But like I said, go ahead and misuse them in your own hold and in your emails if you need to. But now that you've got me all worked up, I retract my offer to misuse apostrophes on my blog.
We can let time work this out. We'll open a grammar book in 50 years and see what it says. If it say's this sentence, is perfectly satisfactory I'll buy you a beer.
When are you going to reveal your identity to me, "Anonymous"?
>>"There needs to be a strict, objective standard to adhere to."
Orwell:
Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Doubleplusgood!
I'd rather postpone the beer, though posthumously, for when our great grandkids get an A on a high school essay that says "apstr0ph3 abuz dr1vz m3 crazy ican hand7e it 0n the smal7 scalE-- 3mail, blogs, simpl coreespondenz,, it maxe me itch a lttl b1t, butn o b1g d33l" -- which is probably how someone from 1790 would view our current documentation.
even google now speaks this way: http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
Dumb novelty now? Without a doubt. Will fast typing, increasingly terse communications or different input devices make this acceptable over 100 years? Who knows?
How many languages don't even have a concept of apostrophes? Is it off the wall that English could evolve along that path?
So isn't one of the reason we have to worry so much more about apostrophes was because of laziness? Making conjunctions out of everything to either make communication efficient or accommodate slang?
So again, we probably learned from and our communication structure was molded based on rules from the early 1900s, or books from the 50's or later, no two of which are the same, written by a couple of guys who have their own opionions. If laws of math and physics are still debated on, rules of grammar will never be solid.
I, too, used to bristle when I saw bad apostrophes, heard the word preventative, or mute point, or irregardless -- but I resigned myself to the fact that all of those words are now in the dictionary and will be used without reservation within a generation. This problem isn't going away, no matter what, and people you respect or will have to put up are going to dump all kinds of bad grammar around.
Maybe my acceptance is because half the people I deal with everyday do not have English as a first language, and that will only increase over time. So I can't really condescend and stress out every time I see bad grammar, because the norm is the bad grammar. I can see a time where the majority of correspondence someone gets will have originated from a foriegn language, and methods for efficient communication will have to evolve and not have to be based on one specific written language. The ability to extract correct meaning from variable written communication will be as fundamental a skill as reading.
So we can either let our blood pressure rise, or realize this has been going on for centuries, follow the rules that make us happy, and make peace with the world.
>>"There needs to be a strict, objective standard to adhere to."
Orwell:
Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Doubleplusgood!
I'd rather postpone the beer, though posthumously, for when our great grandkids get an A on a high school essay that says "apstr0ph3 abuz dr1vz m3 crazy ican hand7e it 0n the smal7 scalE-- 3mail, blogs, simpl coreespondenz,, it maxe me itch a lttl b1t, butn o b1g d33l" -- which is probably how someone from 1790 would view our current documentation.
even google now speaks this way: http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
Dumb novelty now? Without a doubt. Will fast typing, increasingly terse communications or different input devices make this acceptable over 100 years? Who knows?
How many languages don't even have a concept of apostrophes? Is it off the wall that English could evolve along that path?
So isn't one of the reason we have to worry so much more about apostrophes was because of laziness? Making conjunctions out of everything to either make communication efficient or accommodate slang?
So again, we probably learned from and our communication structure was molded based on rules from the early 1900s, or books from the 50's or later, no two of which are the same, written by a couple of guys who have their own opionions. If laws of math and physics are still debated on, rules of grammar will never be solid.
I, too, used to bristle when I saw bad apostrophes, heard the word preventative, or mute point, or irregardless -- but I resigned myself to the fact that all of those words are now in the dictionary and will be used without reservation within a generation. This problem isn't going away, no matter what, and people you respect or will have to put up are going to dump all kinds of bad grammar around.
Maybe my acceptance is because half the people I deal with everyday do not have English as a first language, and that will only increase over time. So I can't really condescend and stress out every time I see bad grammar, because the norm is the bad grammar. I can see a time where the majority of correspondence someone gets will have originated from a foriegn language, and methods for efficient communication will have to evolve and not have to be based on one specific written language. The ability to extract correct meaning from variable written communication will be as fundamental a skill as reading.
So we can either let our blood pressure rise, or realize this has been going on for centuries, follow the rules that make us happy, and make peace with the world.
My only pet peeve is double posting.
Author Irritated by Ongoing Harassment; Refuses to Post Further Argument Unless "Anonymous" Reveals Identity
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2270&e=8&u=/krwashbureau/_bc_cpt_netspeak_wa
local story gone national:
http://www.wjxx.com/news/strange/news-article.aspx?storyid=36696
and made it to FARK.com -- message board:
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1473091
I like the quote:
"apostrophes are the leet speak of high english"
So the fact that there's an international apostrophe protection society, and a debate that was legal and newsworthy, shows how passionate this can be -- and why this blog entry is still getting posts
I followed your link to the Fark site, Mr. I-won't-post-my-real-name-blog-gooner. It made me feel warm to know that fellow Apostronazi Comrades are out there. How embarassing to discover the abuse in which my alma mater is engaging.
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