Hi All,
Now, you do have to admit that Fred has something of a point here. Rarely
does a missing apostrophe leave the reader completely confused as to the
meaning. I tend to be somewhat fanatical about the english language myself,
but I do sympathize with his position.
I am somewhat anal about usage of the comma. My english teachers drummed
"comma fault" into my head to the point where I often get obsessive about
re-reading things to be sure I haven't committed the "ultimate sin" and left
out a comma. I'm sure it causes me to put commas into a sentence that need
not be there.
It doesn't surprise me that the brits have a society to preserve the
apostrophe. They claim full rights and privileges over the language, and
are often pretty critical of how we have bastardized the language here in
the colonies. Unfortunately, in many cases they are right. But, as I often
tell my brit friends, "You are the masters of excess!" Look at all those
vowels they insert which are completely unnecessary in my opinion. "Labour"
instead of "Labor", "honour" instead of "honor", etc. It's beyond me why
they don't take all those unnecessary vowels and, in the interest of
conservation and good will, donate them to some place like Poland where
vowels are sorely lacking! Another place in need is Wales.
Anyway, back to Fred's problem. I think a compromise is in order, and I
have a suggestion--one with which probably nobody will be happy. But here
it is anyway. If you truly feel that inserting an apostrophe midstream in a
word like "don't" is a pain in the neck, why not just wait until your
message is finished and tack on a bunch of apostrophes at the end. Then the
reader, if so inclined, can go back and insert them as necessary. After
all, if they know when one is missing, then they will know where to put
them! But, in fairness, if you opt to do it this way, you need to make sure
you put just the correct number of apostrophes at the end. After all, you
don't want to drive people nuts trying to find where to put some extra
apostrophe you might have tacked on (or do you)! It also helps to assure us
that you really did know better, and just didn't want to take the time to
insert them along the way. It sort of makes a game out of it. Actually,
it's already a game of sorts trying to interpret some of these emails with
all the missing or misspelled words, etc. But this gives the game a little
structure.
What do you think?
Dave W7AQK
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Jensen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Elecraft Reflector" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] K3 - Come on Simon...
The apostrophe is an aberration in the English language, "up with which I
wish I did not have to put." [Apologies to Winston for the liberty of a
misquote]. We use it for so many different things and meanings that it
gets misused often ... or usually. If it can't be said with 26 letters
and 10 digits, maybe it doesnt need to be said that way, or maybe we need
a new word. In fact, I have a modest example ...
"apostrification" [n. Am. English, from the Old Fred] 1. The unnecessary
usage of a really small punctuation mark in places where it is not
required; 2. The foundation for formation of irrelevant organizations
whose goal is to preserve a linguistic irrelevancy, not to be confused
with the Second Class Operators Club whose members often ignore it.
73,
Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2008 Cal QSO Party 4-5 Oct 08
- www.cqp.org
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