The main purpose of the apostrophe today is for pedantic people to harp on when someone fails to use it. The apostrophe has no relation to the spoken language. Punctuation does relate to pauses, intonation etc. but the apostrophe doesn't. And besides, it is annoying on a keyboard, especially on a cellphone where you have to switch to numbers/symbols to get the apostrophe. I know this would cause a few strange words, like Thomas's would become Thomass, but we could get used to it. English is almost unique in that it doesn't have diacritical marks, and I have seen the diaerisis disappear in my lifetime, and the hyphen is on it's way out, so why not the apostrophe?
DOWN WITH APOSTROPHES!!!
larrfirr said
...and the hyphen is on it's way out, so why not the apostrophe?
DOWN WITH APOSTROPHES!!!
Well, down with that one, at any rate....
It's not my wont to cant, but how'll we tell can't from cant and wont from won't?
Ron Draney said
larrfirr said
...and the hyphen is on it's way out, so why not the apostrophe?
DOWN WITH APOSTROPHES!!!
Well, down with that one, at any rate....
Excellent! Speaking of which, I just had an iconoclastic realization regarding possessive pronouns ending in -s. My prior epiphany was that all of the pronouns in possessive form LACKED the apostrophe: my/mine; your/yours; her/hers; his/his; its/#; our/ours; your/yours; their/theirs. BUT I just realized that the impersonal one's/# is an exception.
e.g. One must tend to one's own finances.
On a side note, after a number of goofs with my Android phone's soft keypad I realized I probably didn't have to use what I'd been issued, and went looking to the apps store for alternatives. Most of them are simply variations on a QWERTY layout, but I ran across one innovative offering that not only is completely different but also lets me type scores of characters without switching keypads, yet it has only 14 buttons. There are a number of ways to customize the display and the below image doesn't match my own. On my phone I don't display the letters of the alphabet, any more than I need to see them on my PC's keyboard. But it does display a number of the other characters such as '~', '&', '[' and '', because I sometimes forget where those are.
With one tap or stroke on the 9 main buttons this keyboard can be induced to issue all the letters in the current case plus the following characters: - $ ! / + ` ^ ´ € = ? _ [ ( { ) ] @ | } * < ~ ¨ : . , " ' > ; # & °; you can also change the case, cut and paste, delete forward and back, move the cursor and a few other things. A slightly more complex movement instead of a stroke—a circle or a double-stroke (down and up, for example)—will get you the letters in the other case plus ÷ ¥ ¿ ¡ — £ ± ¬ ª ¶ § plus about a dozen more that I don't see how to reproduce here. There are a good many characters you can produce by simply typing them consecutively: Type 'e ¨', for example, and it makes 'ë', though you don't have to accept that behavior if you don't want it. Tap and hold a key for just over half a second and you get a numeral, or if you're entering a lot of them you can change the keyboard to numerals with just a single tap—but even the numeral keyboard has all the extra non-alpha keys on it, so I can type a phone number with dashes, spaces, parens and so forth without switching back and forth.
The name of the product is MessageEase, and it's available on the Android apps store free. I love it. Compressing all that functionality into a handful of buttons means I can reduce the size of the keyboard (leaving more space to view the message) yet still not have difficulty because of my big fat fingers. And it never, ever tries to correct my typos!