All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
The BBC had an interesting article today, arguing that the possessive apostrophe should be removed from the language:
"Linguist Kate Burridge says punctuation could do with being cut down and the rules of language reviewed. The normal apostrophe is useful but not the possessive, she says. Its supporters say it avoids ambiguity in meaning, (like sisters' books / sister's books), but Burridge thinks context makes it redundant. The hyphen is also surplus to requirements in many cases, she says, because even the editors of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary admitted they're not sure of its proper usage."
On the whole, I take an extremely suspicious view of the notion that language is an entity that should be regulated, either to reform it or to preserve it. The possessive apostrophe is a clear grammatical aberration (naturally so since it is a French introduction into the language, presumably one of many attempts to 'improve' English) that should simply be allowed to wither away. In practice, the possessive apostrophe is already fading from the language, no longer appearing in many contexts (i.e. names and places).
