Dee

I was reading something somewhere that if you had one of those original calculators (maybe boxed in pristine condition, I can't remeber) it would now be worth hundreds of pounds!!

Best go turn out the cupboards!

Jumbox

Hi,

I don't possibly see how the demise of the apostrophe can be a consequence of progress. As far as I am concerned, it's simply a result of ineffectual teaching.

Have I stirred up a hornet's nest?

Ani

Ani,
I agree with you, although my opinion is that the possessive apostrophe is still very much alive and kicking quite happily.

I feel that people who do not use proper English are usually ignorant of the fact that there are such standards - which may be 'accepted' as an excuse - are too lazy to bother with 'fundamentals' - which is not acceptable as an excuse - or are so conceited as to feel that it doesn't apply to them.

Sure, we all make mistakes but good writing demands that we forever search for 'improvements' to our writing in every sense of the word. The use of possessive apostrophe is certainly not archaic.

Language is evolving all the time, this is an inherent quality within any language. Texting will influence it, but I hope not too much.

Len

Doesn't that depend on your definition of progress?

Yes, it's true, what does progress mean? Languages evolve. New languages form. Dialects form. Usually over hundreds of years!

A written language is a system of symbols accepted to represent certain meaning. The meaning conveyed by the apostrophe, both in the contraction and the possessive, make understanding straightforward rather than an act of excavation of meaning.

Another stir of the buzzy nest!

Ani

Not entirely sure I agree with IB about the impact of texting on the Great Barrier Reef but. . .

Ani, you're not being controversial about blaming institutionalised illiteracy in Britain's edukashun sistum. I said so earlier in this thread. Which is why I'm not inclined to go along with Jumbo's notion that the decline in literacy has something to do with technology.

The reason why I don't think it does is because I still remember the day, back in March of 1973, when we'd just moved to a new house in an area with which we weren't familiar and I needed -- of all things -- a bath plug. A neighbour directed me to a nearby plumber's merchant and thus did I find myself confronting a very large sign over the shop door reading TUB'S AND LOO'S. So I went in and asked if Tub or Loo could help. . .

Since then, of course, we've had everything from TAXI'S to FISH & CHIP'S. Nothing to do with technology. Everything to do with raging ignorance on a massive scale -- because even if bloody signwriters can't spell, clients ought to be ready to correct the mistakes. But they don't. Because they're stupid. And now in every town in this country there are lot's of businesses' run by halfwits' who dont actually understand that theres' something wrong with the sign's over their doorway's.

Actually, it's worse than that. Audi recently ran a series of glossy magazine ads (sorry: ad's) notable for not one but two possessive apostrophe errors. If you know anything about advertising and marketing then you'll realise the errors went undetected by the client, the brand manager, the art director, the designer, the copywriter, and the proof reader, on a collective salary of over £200k.

What we should do is get as furious as IB does with this kind of corrosion. But I fear if we penned a letter of complaint, the recipient's wouldnt' no how to respond proper.

Richard

* Dee: I remember my first calculator too! She was 14 and oh boy, could she add up. My first encounter with economics, therefore, was in trying to figure out how come I was skint after buying her 'Please Please Me', a Wimpy, and a necklace (from, er, Woolworths) all in the course of one Saturday afternoon.

** Thought for the day. During research of my latest unpublished masterpiece, I used my mobile to ring a former NASA employee. He told me I had more computing power in my base-model Nokia than he'd had for Apollo 11. . .

So obviously. They never went to the moon at all.

Richard,

You have echoed my sentiments about the ignorance of a very large percentage of the population. On the question of advertising my biggest faux pas was to allow a full page advert to go through for our large Supermarket Client with the offer of 'LION CHOPS'. There were some very angry roars when this appeared! So, even in the highly-paid field of marketing, and without the now-oft-repeated excuse of dyslexia, we all make mistakes.

Len

Feel I ought to mention it was not my calculator. I was earning the massive wage of £5.50 a week at the time (yeah – even then it was slave labour) so £58 was just a tadge out of my reach.

I loathe tortured shop signs. I see Kopper Kettle or Curl up ‘n Dye and I want to put a brick through the window. And then set fire to the place. I hate ‘n…. Froot ‘n Veg. Do they really think it’s clever? I’d rather starve than give them my money.

Richard, I think Jumbo has a valid point about technology. I think I’m pretty good at spelling but there are a few words I seem to have a mental block about. Double consonants are my main bugbear so, to avoid disrupting the creative flow, I use the Autocorrect option. Trouble is it means I don’t need to make the effort to learn how to spell these words. I’m not blaming the technology – just saying it’s easier to use it than to memorise long lists of words.

Having said that – all is not lost – my sister’s nine-year-old granddaughter has just scored 60 out of 60 in a ‘spellathon’ at school. I don’t know which words she had to spell but I don’t care. I’m as proud of her as hell.

(but I hate the word ‘spellathon’!)

Dee.

ps - lion chops, Len! Priceless!

Len: Wonderful! Back in the days of hot metal (aaaagh!) I remember when the London Evening News ran a quarter page display based on scribbled copy provided to a halfwit comp. The result was a memorable advertisement for Taylor's of Harlesden. London's Oldest Established Shop Lifters.

Richard

Richard,
The days of stereos, electros, .917 typeheight... yes! The now-defunct 'Advertisers Weekly' once carried a rather serious editorial in its centrefold. It emphasised the importance of Research and included the statement that 'one must take into account all the farts and figures...' You can imagine what fun we all had with that!

Len

There will always be people who care about language, who are linguistically intelligent, who love words, syntax, semantics and so on. Equally there will always be people who do not see that remembering apostrophes is of crucial importance to the running of things in general. I don't agree with them - I love apostrophes (!) and I will admit to flinching when I see them in the wrong places - but I can see their point. It is very pompous of "wordy" people to assume that they are inherently superior to non-wordy people. There are different kinds of intelligence, after all, and somebody who, for example, has the intelligence and initiative to set up their own fruit and vegetable shop and make a living out of it for themselves and their family is bloody well entitled to label it in whatever way they choose. So they write "apple's n orange's" out the front. Big deal. They're not in the business of winning literary prizes, after all, they just want you to know what they're selling - which you do. And they would be quite rightly offended by some smart-ass wordy type going in and making sneery jokes about their signage. The notion that one would rather starve than buy apples from such a shop is unbelievably precious.
Blaming teachers for such errors is erroneous. I have taught in schools in both disadvantaged and in well-off areas, (though I am not teaching this year) and I can tell any of you who are not teachers that the standard of teaching is the same in either area (in fact it is often higher in disadvantaged areas - it has to be). Every year, teachers do their best, givn all current thinking on teaching methodologies, to teach some of the finer points of grammar to children of all ages.
I'm going to make a few generalisations about socio-economic backgrounds now, which hopefully you'll excuse, given that I'm ranting a bit already and otherwise could write tomes on this. In less well-off areas, parents frequently (again, a generalisation - obviously this is not always the case) do not have a high level of education themselves, or have other problems at home which mean that they have little time for overseeing homework or encouraging literacy in their children. There are more pressing issues in their lives. They may themselves have struggled through school and have a negative attitude both to schools and to teachers. Grammar and apostrophes, to put it in brief, are not high on their list of priorities, for any number of reasons. (A case in point: I overheard on a bus recently a little girl correcting her mother "Ma, my teacher says you have to say 'I saw', not 'I seen'" to which the answer was: 'don't mind your teacher, love, she's from down the country'.) In better-off areas the difference in literacy comes not from the teachers - who again do their best to teach grammatical niceties - but from parents, who know the rules themselves, encourage their children in knowing them, and can help out with homework involving grammatical exercises.
Incidentally, far more children in disadvantaged areas have tvs in their rooms. They don't read as much.

On the other hand, I'll go along with the general WW thinking when it comes to a big company - such as Audi - making stupid errors in its advertising. They have no excuse.

I blame the parents. Far too many mouth-breathing idiots are allowed to spew offspring at an alarming rate, regardless of their parental credentials, financial stability (or lack thereof), etc.

Now, I'll take a human rights battering for suggesting this (you can tell I've mentioned this before), but I personally believe that it should be patently illegal for anyone to have a child without first qualifying as a well informed and educated parent, able to look after their child, demonstrating that they have both the environmental and financial stability in which to bring up a child, and ultimately be able to provide documented proof that they are an able and suitable parent, able to commit the necessary resources (including time out of their own lives) to devote to the child's upbringing.

Ooh, I hear the anti-facist coo, 'it's my right to have children whenever I see fit'. Well, unto you Oh tree-hugging, ill-informed philistine I say this - it is my right to expect that my earnings will not be soaked up by taxes to subsidise your cost of living because you've had more children than you can afford. It is my right to expect that yet more money should not be spent forcing your ignorant spawn through education their malformed brains have no interest in. It is my right to expect that a bunch of mistreated rugrats will not be released upon the streets as the Ted Bundy's of tomorrow. It is my right to expect that you should be able to conduct your life with more in mind than sucking benefits, slapping children into reticence and stalking the high street with your children in pushchairs, wielded as battering rams with which you push, shove, scream and torture your way to fashion items on which you blow your fraudulently acquired cash when it should instead be concentrated on the oppressed hellspawn which allowed you to get it in the first place.

Democracy is a joke, because an overwhelming number of self-important plebian oafs who cannot even conduct their own lives properly are responsible for choosing who represents them on the national and international arena.

To be honest, it's a wonder humanity has survived as long as it has, and I count the days until nuclear armageddon - the only forseeable conclusion to our current predicament, because there is too much selfishness inherent in humans to work together to make things work - takes us all in a puff of life-consuming smoke.

<Added>

Nothing quite like a big rant to wind down the day.

Hibernian: Sorry to disagree but. . .

A culture is shaped by the precedents it allows to be created. And one of the worst precedents we ever accepted in this country was the screwball notion that teaching children the phonetic alphabet was A Good Idea. (‘Oh, but why ever not? Surely it helps them to express themselves -- and that’s all that really matters’ [/l]was the explanation I was given by individuals who, back in the staffroom, may well have decided oh gawd, there’s another middle class parent going on the rampage. . .)

Yet an attack upon illiteracy is not a form of class warfare.

Put it another way: my parents and my grandparents came from the poorest of pit villages. But they could read, and write, and spell. And they actually thought that was important. Not as a political act. But as a discipline worthy of the learning.

Because if language is a currency, then every coin has a value and deserves to be recognised, and counted. Not thrown away because it’s too awkward to handle.

Re your comment about apples ’n oranges: I’ve no problem at all with the vernacular. But the vernacular and the illiterate are quite different: the one has a richness, a vitality, and a colour that the other does not. The former is informed by wit, vigour and imagination, the latter by, well, nothing at all.

As to the shop or the store that’s content to promote itself in slipshod fashion, well; if they can’t be bothered to get their signage right, I don’t think prospective customers are being either ‘pompous’ or ‘wordy’ if they start wondering about the mind-set – commercial and otherwise – that’s manifest there. Pretty straightforward, I’d’ve thought: if you can’t care less about how you represent your enterprise to the wider world, why should the wider world care about you?

Re the business of winning literary prizes. I guess you were in full flow there, Hibernian, because God knows I don’t expect the proprietor of the neighbourhood fruit and veg to qualify for the Pulitzer – I’m wondering here if you’re stretching the original argument to a point no-one else actually took it: I guess it’s the kind of diversion that can crop up in discussions such as this.

To clarify then (from my ’umble perspective at least):

1) The more that the slipshod is allowed to pass without remark or regret, the more it becomes the norm. And when it becomes the norm, well. . .

2) Where d’you reckon those failures stem from in the Audi ad? Some sudden collective burst of illiteracy? No.

That ad is a reflection of the way its creators have been conditioned by the environment in which we now – all of us – inhabit. Lamenting that ad as a specific (and yes, I’m glad you agree that it should never have gone uncorrected) without addressing the context is like lamenting the death of a forest without trying to figure out how it came to be robbed of all its nutrients.

To every effect there is a cause, and damning the former without troubling to diagnose the latter doesn’t strike me as particularly constructive.

All I’m saying is, language is important. As an absolute. As a discipline.

As to the defence of language, aw, come on: that has nothing to do with class, politics, background, or region – which is what we’re talking about here: the defence, not the learning, not the acquisition of literacy.

Which is why the observations about kids with TVs and socio-economic pressures surely aren’t relevant here: we all know, or we should, that this is an unequal society of unequal opportunity.

So, given that as a reality, what happens, then, after school days are over and a new generation has emerged? Are you saying that those who – for whatever reason: education, inclination, whatever – understand there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things, of saying things, they should simply stay mute and say, well, why worry? It’s the way things have gone. Let it be.

Unapologetically then, I’ll quite happily continue to march in to Tub’s and Loo’s and ask how ol’ Tub is doing nowadays.

Because maybe my question will make him think. And maybe – just maybe – he’ll tell his kids that actually, literacy is important. . . Whether he found out from a pompous over-educated middle-class git or not!

Pip! Pip!

Richard