A weird thing happened to yesterday’s post. I’d copied and pasted it, added a bit of an intro, hit publish and then viewed it for editing. As I’m writing on my phone at the moment I nake tols of nistakes, as the woman trying to use sign language said in Four Weddings and a Funeral. But the post wasn’t there. The title, There are No Words, sat above an expanse of white screen. I thought that was utterly appropriate, both for the anniversary of Cohens death and for Remembrance day. So I let it stand, except that when I looked later the post was there after all. So never mind. But I quite liked the silent dignity of a post without words.
The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted that earlier I missed the apostrophe off Cohens. This was not a nistake. No! For I have decided, along with an English tutor at my college, that we should abolish the apostrophe. That’s right! Get rid of it! We don’t need it!
Seriously, what purpose does the apostrophe serve? It shows possession and missing letters but both of these things are obvious without sticking a single inverted comma between letters. And they are so often used wrongly that we’d be better off without them.
So there.
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 
As a self-acknowledged grammar pedant, I have to lobby for keeping the apostrophe! I know I sound like a whingeing old fart some of the time [and I try to limit my impulse to correct my daughters’ grammar to the difference between less & fewer], but I do genuinely feel that standards in both written & spoken English have declined drastically in my lifetime [yes, America: I’m looking at you], which does, IMHO, inevitably lead to lack of clarity, so ditching the apostrophe might be the middle of the wedge: the thin edge having inveigled its way into our culture in the 1950s. Sorry, but there you are: I know it might not be easy for mobile ‘phone users with the vicissitudes of the tiny keyboard [and algorithmic text replacement], but standards must be maintained! 😉 Cheers, Jon.
I’m with Jon. It still riles me when I see signs in shops like ‘Vegetable’s’, ‘Tyre’s’ and ‘Video’s’. 🙂
If the apostrophe goes, the next thing will be accepting the frequent misuse of ‘Their’ and ‘There’, ‘Your’ and ‘You’re’, along with ‘Its’ and ‘It’s’. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.