Retired journalist John Richard’s founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001, its mission to convince people that apostrophe’s denote missing letter’s and possession, but never plurals.
Now Richard’s is 96 and he’s shutting down the society, saying that “fewer organisation’s and individual’s are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language…the ignorance and lazines’s present in modern times have won.”
For clarity: all the extraneous apostrophes in this post are my own, not Richards’s’.
“Instead, within a month of my plaint appearing in a national newspaper, I received over 500 letters of support, not only from all corners of the United Kingdom, but also from America, Australia, France, Sweden, Hong Kong and Canada.”
Apostrophe society shuts down because ‘ignorance and laziness have won’ [Tim Baker/Evening Standard]
(via Naked Capitalism)
(Image: William Murphy, CC BY-SA, cropped)