Thursday, 12 January 2012

(')

A missed opportunity: Comic Sans.

This week one of the last bookshop chains left in the country changed the font of its branding back to a good old-fashioned Baskerville after twenty months' dalliance with HMV's rounded sans: a rational (if retrograde) move given that it no-longer belongs to HMV. In light of internet grammar,  they've also dropped an apostrophe (as their press release says: "Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling").

In response, rather than reporting some important events, bored journalists across the country have been ringing up the Apostrophe Protection Society (or just copying and pasting from The Telegraph like this BBC article does).

I used to find the enraged prescriptivists annoying. Nowadays I'm more annoyed by the journalists. After a brief shout at the news, I might console myself with a little chuckle at what the OED has to say on the matter:

"[The possessive apostrophe] originally marked merely the omission of e in writing, as in fox's, James's, and was equally common in the nominative plural, esp. of proper names and foreign words (as folio's = folioes); it was gradually disused in the latter, and extended to all possessives, even where e had not been previously written, as in man's, children's, conscience' sake." 

In such regard, the possessive apostrophe has much in common with that of the grocer.

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