I Can't Stand It

When I turned on the computer this morning, I noticed a headline in the Odd News window of my homepage: Its a catastrophe for the apostrophe in Britain.

They have decided to remove apostrophes from signs. A half hour later, I am still fuming.

First, the comma. Now the apostrophe. When will it end?

I can't remember when I noticed all the missing commas before the 'and' in lists, but it drives me mad. Lori tells me they had some excuse about saving advertising space or something, but that is asinine. Don't people realize that, these days, a good book is probably not where most kids pick up what they think of as the proper use of punctuation?

A comma is supposed to tell a person when to pause when reading. Take for example the phrase, "My socks are black, white, and red." This is read, "My-socks-are-black [pause] white [pause] and-red." I don't know anyone that says, "My-socks-are-black [pause] white-and-red."

Apostrophes, I would argue, are almost more important than commas, with all the business of contractions, plurality, possession, and whatnot.

My children might get mercilessly taunted when they get older for being archaic, but I am going to teach them proper comma and apostrophe use.

*post script* Once again, I am going to point out some of my blaring hypocrisy. I realize that my use of punctuation is less than perfect. I realize that traditionally, the use of three periods (...) is meant to show where words were eliminated from a quotation, but I frequently use it to express a long pause after a phrase or sentence. I am not at all picky about punctuation when it comes to literature. If art was confined to rules, it would be a dull world we live in. No, wait, I take that back. It depends on what literature it is we're talking about. Ulysses would not be Ulysses if it wasn't a little (I mean, very) confusing, but another book... Well, I hope you know what I mean.This is where the scientist and the artist in me draws definite boundaries. Some things need to be clearly defined, and others need to be left open to personal interpretation. So laugh at me and my little pet peeve, and forget I ever wrote this...

Now that I've wasted an hour of my Saturday writing this ranting drivel....