The Apostrophe

[racoony]

Isnt it time to scrap the apostrophe?After all, its too difficult to understand when to use it and its useless anyway.You can still understand peoples meaning without it cant you?

[Jackdaw33]

Apostrophes do not only show possession, they are used to indicate missing letters dropped in speech.'boy's ' can mean
'of the boy', 'boy is' or 'boy has', depending on the context of the sentence.

[ladybirder]

I possess that book Clover, somewhere. Or I did and might have sent it to a charity shop. I'll have a look for Ladybirder's book;-)

[Canary42]

To scrap the apostrophe is yet another case of yielding to the Dumbs.

It's not difficult to understand.

The meaning can be unclear on its omission.

It's no wonder mental acuity is on the wane - and this proposed dumbing down has a parallel in the numeracy world with the advent of decimal coinage, which led to a lower standard of numeracy all round.

[Old_Geezer]

Could you rephrase the OP ? I can't understand your meaning.

[snags]

So, general consensus seems to be that racoony is talking out of his apostrophe.

[dannyk13]

My local council got rid of the apostrophe on street signs a couple of years ago,now we have several St.Michaels in an avenue etc.It's crazy.

[mushroom25]

//a reference to Victor Borge..//

I saw Mr Borge at the barbican in 1992, when he was 83. he mentioned phonetic punctuation but said he'd leave it until next time he came to London. there was then a long pause.... and he said "oh. you're all thinking.... there isn't going to be a next time". turns out there wasn't (he died in 2000), but he did do phonetic punctuation that night, as his encore.