You need to know your its from your it's

Wednesday, 29 April 2009 16:59 Written by Andrew Halloway

APPARENTLY two local authorities, Wakefield and Birmingham, are planning on removing apostrophes from street signs. 'So what?' you might well reply.

The answer is simple: apostrophes help us understand meaning.

The argument from Birmingham Council for removing apostrophes goes something like this: since some signs have already been mistakenly put up without an apostrophe, and others haven't, and it would be expensive to replace existing signs whose apostrophe is missing, we might as well get rid of apostrophes altogether, to avoid confusion.

  The problem with that is that it produces more confusion than it solves, because apostrophes (and all punctuation) exist for a reason. For example, if some places have a Queen's St and a Queens St, and firefighters don't have the postcode, which one does a fire engine head to if called out to a fire? They can always ask, is that the one with or without the apostrophe? But if you got rid of the apostrophe they would both be Queens St, so there'd be no way of distinguishing them.

If we get rid of apostrophes, we limit the options we have for explaining what we mean. And once you get rid of them, why not get rid of commas and full stops as well? Some teachers and examiners already ignore the correct use of commas and sentence construction when marking students' work. The result is that school leavers enter the marketplace and write gobbledygook for their employers that customers fail to understand, and then wonder why there are so many misunderstandings in customer service.

Birmingham Council also says that because computerised databases and satellite navigation systems can't cope with apostrophes, we might as well not use them. Well, talk about throwing in the towel! Just because illiterate software writers have failed to accommodate apostrophes into their technology, does that mean we should therefore make the same mistake on everything else? What kind of argument is that?!

Councils should be aiming to improve standards, not capitulating to a lack of education. If they have their way, it will reinforce our lazy society that is beginning to believe correct grammar, punctuation and spelling don't matter. Is it any wonder that schoolchildren in some developing countries are scoring higher in international English standards than our own kids who live in the motherland of English? And their education will help them get ahead of us in business and industry in the future. I'm glad for them, but it's not good for this country.

Other countries used to respect this nation as having one of the highest standards of education in the world. That is no longer a commonly held view.

In the 2008 national tests for 11-year-olds, 329 primary schools in England achieved perfect results for all their pupils in English, maths and science. But in a far larger number of schools -  797 - fewer than half their pupils could even understand these basics. Last year's statistics also showed that, after 11 years of education, one in six 16-year-olds finished school without a single decent qualification.

Children are not born any 'thicker' than they were 50 years ago, so it must be our education system that is to blame - as well as parents who fail to spend enough time helping their kids to read and learn.

If we don't care about spelling and grammar we are asking for bad communication and reducing the chances of understanding each other correctly.

The famous book title 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation' is a classic illustration. It's based on a joke about punctuation in a wildlife book:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"Well, I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Placing a comma after "Eats" was a fatal mistake!

The English language is famous for its subtlety and complexity that enables us to express fine differences in meaning. It's one reason why it is the most widely spoken language in the world. But it seems that we, its originators, don't care about it any more.

Make sure you know the difference between your it's and your its.