The apostrophe (‘) often haunts blogs, emails, and other communications, including handwritten shop signs. Is the ‘ (particularly in its misuse) a vestige of the dying art of punctuation?
A friend shared this article (Is This the Future of Punctuation!? – WSJ.com) and now know why I’ve had a sense of the disappearance of some punctuation (especially the ‘). My punctuating brain, drilled by South Grove elementary teachers (the school itself has vanished, perhaps that is an omen), knows when ‘ ‘should’ be there, yet it’s not. Likewise, when the little demon is troubling a sentence as unwanted as a frightening apparition, I feel a prickle in my spine, the hair on the back of my neck rising.
Like the ghost limb of an amputee, ‘ asserts itself, wrongly in some places, missing in others. It’s = it is and not the possessive, for instance.
Yet ‘ is a creature, as the article points out, that is mainly a device for the eye, not the ear.
Will ‘ eventually disappear from print, as the article writer suggests in the last paragraph? Spooky thought for a grammarian.
Susan Koefod 