Of Matters Apostrophic

Kevin Drum also wrote two posts yesterday about writing and written language, one about punctuation and one about the five-paragraph essay (which I believe may be useful in sixth or seventh grade classes, as a way of forcing kids into structuring their thoughts, but should never be used again). What caught my eye was Kevin's idea that the apostrophe should be abandoned. He says that this should happen because spoken English has never come up with any way of "reflecting" punctuation in the way that commas, semicolons and periods turn up in spoken language as pauses and shifts in inflection.

But Kevin doesn't provide any alternative for the job the apostrophe does; how would written English, bereft of the apostrophe, denote possession or contraction? Would we simply ram it all together? Consider the following:

"I scratched my cats ears."

Now, simply depending on the placement of an apostrophe, the meaning of the sentence can be changed:

"I scratched my cat's ears."

"I scratched my cats' ears."

The fact that both sentences would be spoken in the same way in conversation, and thus might lead to a certain ambiguity, doesn't seem to me good reason for spreading that ambiguity all the way around to those sentences' written forms as well. Language is a messy and imperfect thing, to be sure, but I am not at all convinced that getting rid of apostrophes will help matters in the slightest.

And in the post about the "five paragraph essay" (which, thank God, I was never taught), Kevin seems to concede the underlying problem with his "Ditch the apostrophe" argument without realizing it. At one point he says that the common bit of writing wisdom, "Write like you talk", is bogus. (Believe me, if I wrote this blog the way I talk, it would feature a lot more profanity, a lot more stuff like "Well uh....", and a lot less cohesion.) But by rejecting the idea of "Write like you talk", Kevin shows that he's aware that spoken language and written language are not the same thing, and the latter should be required to map seamlessly onto the former.