Who called the grammar police?

Bookshop chain Waterstone’s has revealed that it is ditching the apostrophe to become, simply, ‘Waterstones’.

Apparently, the argument is that “Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling”. Understandably, organisations like the Apostrophe Protection Society are up in arms.

This isn’t the first time this poor little superscripted comma has run into trouble. Check out Stephen Fry’s amusing tweet and there is also a growing body of opinion that the apostrophe is actually dying out. As Waterstones suggests, online copy and text-speak are hardly doing it any favours.

So what do I think? Speaking as a massively pedantic writer, proof-reader, editor and unashamed Grammar Nazi, I think people who get apostrophes wrong should have their errant copy engraved on stone tablets which are then used to beat them to death. It’s not that hard, people.

And more to the point, without it we’re opening up a great deal of the written word to misinterpretation. It might not be so bad to miss out an apostrophe in a tweet or SMS, but in a legal contract or business email it could make a significant difference.

So my advice is, if you don’t know how to use them just go to the Society’s website at the link above and find out. People are willing to stop giant pandas from dying out, and many of them can’t even be bothered to reproduce. Frankly, apostrophes have far more impact on the modern world.