I always did stick apostrophes in at random just to show willing Wilk, must be a grocer at heart!
Evidently we are starting to dump them as a relic of the past anyway as the Americans have done:-
http://www.turnerink.co.uk/grammar-tips ... ace-names/
http://www.salon.com/2002/12/17/apostrophe/
Seems like use of the apostrophe is dying out as more of the world now follows US English than UK, including our own younger generations? Evidently even in English the correct use of the apostrophe changed over the centauries as what was originally misuse eventually became the norm for modern scholars of English, or are they all in fact guilty of still misusing it themselves?
"But, contrary to what defenders of the apostrophe imagine, its status has long been moot. Before the seventeenth century the apostrophe was rare. The Parisian printer Geoffroy Tory promoted it in the 1520s, and it first appeared in an English text in 1559.
Initially the apostrophe was used to signify the omission of a sound. Gradually it came to signify possession. This possessive use was at first confined to the singular. However, writers were inconsistent in their placing of the punctuation mark, and in the eighteenth century, as print culture burgeoned, everything went haywire. Although it seemed natural to use an apostrophe in the possessive plural, authorities, such as the grammarian Robert Lowth, argued against this. In a volume entitled "Grammatical Institutes" (1760), John Ash went so far as to say that the possessive apostrophe "seems to have been introduced by mistake."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henry-hit ... 29337.html
http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html? ... 28&k=39412
"As the digital age increasingly dominates business growth and success, the death of the apostrophe could, alas, become inevitable. That's because it messes up hashtags and catchy URLs."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens ... iness.html.
Texting has already altered spelling for the younger generation and even many of the older generation who know better, therefore the language will inevitably alter to suit the convenience of the user and its manner of transmission. How many now use apostrophes anywhere in a word when texting?
Therefore we have two opinions on language. The first is the academic pedant who believes it should be as it was always intended. If so then as John Ash in 1760 indicates an apostrophe should only indicate a missing sound and all other uses of it are incorrect. An error which University lecturers and teachers, who are usually pedants, have been passing on to their students for hundreds of years!
We have the example with plant descriptions in that if you wish to be certain what a species Lemaire described was you have to go back to it's original description to find out, not simply refer to some later text like Britton & Rose and assume that to be correct. Therefore teachers, or their students wishing to be pedantic should not rely on often erroneous text books written long after the apostrophe was first used, but refer back to the first recorded usage.
The second group are the persons who believes languages move on and evolve. If that is so then yesterdays usage of the apostrophe you were taught by your teachers can be no more correct than that being used today, grocers apostrophe included. Neither can modern text books be correct since they are simply mirroring how the apostrophe evolved from misusing it from solely indicating a missing sound in the past, but not indicating how it is now evolving or even being scrapped.
Languages are the possession of those speaking them, not the academics since they are constantly evolving and the academics in a generation or two will be teaching todays supposedly misuse as the correct usage, as past history shows us. I am afraid teachers just teach what they were taught, not what is necessarily correct, after all they taught the earth was flat at one time and the sun revolved around the earth!
Nottingham Branch BCSS. Joined the then NCSS in 1961, Membership number 11944. Cactus only collection.
