{"id":37741,"date":"2011-07-22T12:19:48","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T17:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=37741"},"modified":"2011-11-02T20:00:10","modified_gmt":"2011-11-03T01:00:10","slug":"apostrophes-technology-and-social-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/07\/22\/apostrophes-technology-and-social-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Apostrophes, Technology, and Social Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Changes in language seem to just happen. Nobody sets out to introduce a change, but suddenly people are saying \u201cgroovy\u201d or \u201cmy bad.\u201d And then they\u2019re not. Even written language changes, though the evolution is slower. <\/span><\/p>\n

Last weekend, I saw this sign at a goat farm on Long Island.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

WER’E ??<\/p>\n

I used to care about the apostrophe, but after years of reading student papers about \u201cdifferent society\u2019s,\u201d I have long accepted that the tide is against me. The apostrophe today is where spelling was a few hundred years ago \u2013 you can pretty much make up your own rules. <\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes the rule is fairly clear: use an apostrophe in plurals when leaving it out makes the word look like a different word rather than a plural form of the original. Change the \u201cy\u201d in \u201csociety\u201d to \u201cies\u201d and it looks too different. \u201cOf all the cafe\u2019s, I like the one with lime martini\u2019s.\u201d The \u201ccorrect\u201d version is <\/span>cafes<\/em><\/span> and <\/span>martinis<\/em><\/span>. but I think they take a nanosecond or two longer to mentally process.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or these<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Technically, it should be \u201cON DVDS.\u201d But DVDS looks like it\u2019s some government agency (I gotta go down to the DVDS tomorrow) or maybe a disease. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not always easy to figure out what rule or logic the writer is following. The little apostrophe seems to be plunked in almost at random. Not random, really. It\u2019s usually before an \u201cs.\u201d But why does Old Navy say, \u201cNobody get\u2019s hurt\u201d? <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a prescriptivist Website, ApostropheAbuse.com<\/a>, that collects these (that\u2019s where I found the DVDS and Old Navy pictures). They\u2019re fighting a losing battle. <\/span><\/p>\n

Technology matters \u2013 I guess that\u2019s the sociological point here. The invention of print and then the widespread dissemination of identical texts herded us towards standardization. Printers became a separate professional group (not part of the church or state), and most of them were in the same place (London). They had a stranglehold on published spelling. <\/span><\/p>\n

For the last few decades, anyone could be a printer. The page you are now reading might harbor countless errors in punctuation and spelling (though spell-checkers greatly reduce misspellings), but it looks just as good as an online article in the Times, and it\u2019s published in a similar way to potentially as many readers. And now there\u2019s texting. It\u2019s already pushing upper case letters off the screen, and the apostrophe forecast doesn\u2019t look so good either. But what will still be interesting is not the missing apostrophe but the apostrophe added where, by traditional rules, it doesn\u2019t belong.<\/span><\/p>\n

I still can\u2019t figure out WER\u2019E.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. Changes in language seem to just happen. Nobody sets out to introduce a change, but suddenly people are saying \u201cgroovy\u201d or \u201cmy bad.\u201d And then they\u2019re not. Even written language changes, though the evolution is slower. Last weekend, I saw this sign at a goat farm on Long Island. WER’E ?? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,2102,129,290],"class_list":["post-37741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-gender-history","tag-media","tag-sciencetechnology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37741"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41368,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37741\/revisions\/41368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}