APOSTROPHOBIA:

SYMPTOMS AND SUGGESTED THERAPY


Apostrophobia is not a disease in the strictest sense. It is a fear of something so unnatural and so perverted that we would be well advised to treat the condition as the normal state of mental health.

Why, after all, is our written language still disfigured by apostrophes - these entirely unnecessary flourishes? In appearance commas, they have been elevated in altitude as well as in esteem, always a hieroglyph cherished by bourgeois pedants who want the printed language to be their private fiefdom. The semi-literate up to now have trespassed on this parkland in danger of the deadliest laughter - that greeting grammatical faux pas: these were people, it was hinted, who were wobbly on their reading legs and thought 'mishit' was some kind of careless defecation.

The apostrophiles - fortunately a breed that's fast approaching extinction - were thus the biggest snobs on the block, people who genuinely appreciated T.S. Eliot's Greek epigraphs even though they could not construe them. They sneered at the plural potatoe's; they deprecated Finnegans Wake; they anathematised Barons Court, preferring the cachet of Earl's Court. Apostrophobes on the other hand felt like strangers in their own language, obnubilated by semicolons, dazzled by vocabulary so long and so unfamiliar they sometimes wondered whether they were reading a foreign language after all (with its ne plus ultras and its sine qua nons). Then, par dessus le marché, there were those impediments to flowing print called apostrophes.

Our fops are alone in Europe - que je sache - to be clinging to this outmoded punctuation in the genitive. 'Keep the English pound!' they shriek and, in the same breath, 'keep the apostrophe! When we read "the father's book" we see many fathers cheek by jowl with a book and not knowing what to do with it. Apostrophise the noun, and, hey presto, we know it's "the book of the father".'

Are Germans confused? Apparently not. 'Das Buch des Vaters' needs no apostrophe. Yet leaving it out in English is seen by some as the written equivalent of dropping your aitches - Haitches?¹.

But it's not only the genitive syndrome that concerns us here. There's the whole vexatious question of contractions (notice my spelling of 'its' and 'theres'). An apostrophobe myself, though a compulsive indulger in these aspiring commas, I cannot bear the cavilling distinctions between 'it is' and 'of it'. The enemy tells us that without the squiggle we would be confused: in 'it's mine', they claim, we are uncertain whether we are dealing with 'it is mine' or 'the mine belonging to it'. We point out that mines are seldom owned by inanimate objects, to which they counter that a town could have one - Kimberley for the sake of argument. Thus 'Kimberley's mine' could well be 'its mine,' they say - and to this in turn I reply that its purely a matter of context and that, besides, for the ear there are no punctuation marks, and yet in listening we are seldom confused.

It is only in the genitive that genuine confusion is possible aurally in the lack of distinction between 'the mother of the girl' and 'the mother of the girls'. But again the context should tell us which is meant.

However, we now have an ally in the commercial world: the big retail outlets are succumbing to our pressures: 'MENS WEAR' and 'WOMENS WEAR' have begun to drop the abhorred apostrophe. Yet it does not stop there: the journal for writers with the widest circulation in Britain is Writers News! Need I say more?

And now a brief symptomatology. How will you recognise the apostrophobe? By three qualities: intelligenge, distinction, breeding. As for therapy, there is but one we need, and that is the imminent demise of the apostrophe.



¹That the plural of 'Vater' is not 'Vaters', but 'Väter' is awkward, so I shall choose to ignore it.