January 16, 2012

Outrage continues over Waterstone’s dropping its apostrophe

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Outrage continues unabated, even intensified, in the UK over the fact that the country’s biggest bookseller, Waterstone’s, decided to become Waterstones last Tuesday.

As we reported in a MobyLives story at the time, Waterstone’s — sorry, Waterstones’s — head, James Daunt, announced the company was returning to its original font, Baskerville, but not its original punctuation: it was dropping the possessive apostrophe. Daunt said the company was doing this because of — what else? — digital reasons. “Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling,” he said.

There’s something to that, as a glance at the url to this page will attest — God knows where that apostrophe went — but it’s not enough for a lot of the people who gave the language its name.

For one thing, notes Richard Lea in a Guardian commentary,  “Daunt certainly seems a little grammatically confused when he argues that the new name reflects the ‘continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers’ —  anyone for Waterstones’?”

At Prospect Magazine, David Skelton says of Daunt’s explanation,

This, of course, is arrant nonsense. The march of the digital world, as Daunt puts it, is no excuse for misuse of the English language. Indeed, in many ways, the digital world has given written English a new lease of life through the proliferation of blogs and online journals.

Waterstone’s decision screams of a scramble for credibility.  It’s rather like the middle-aged classical music fan who suddenly develops a taste for hip hop and trance in order to impress his kids.

Meanwhile numerous Waterstones customers have been lambasting the company on Twitter, in surprisingly emotional tweets, such as one saying, “Somehow this breaks my heart. First the Oxford Comma, now the Waterstone’s apostrophe…leading me to ask, what next?”

But it’s John Richards, the chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society, whom we quoted in our earlier report, who continues to lead the charge, saying, “It’s just plain wrong. It’s grammatically incorrect. If Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s can get it right, then why can’t Waterstones. You would really hope that a bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English,” according to a Telegraph report.

Philip Hensher, however, in another — and fascinating — Telegraph column, says “in fact, it’s not quite as simple as that. Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s do indeed preserve the apostrophe on their shopfronts. Their websites’ URLs, however, are without it. A web address could, I suppose, include an apostrophe. But if it did, it would turn away anyone who thought the shop might be called Sainsburys’ or Sainsburys. Better to omit the apostrophe.”

Still, Hensher takes issue with Daunt nonetheless, and with those who say it doesn’t really matter:

And yes, these things do matter. Correct usage has become more, not less important with the advent of the computer. We are all submerged by messages by email from institutions and companies, some perfectly genuine, others not. It’s striking that many fraudulent “phishing” emails contain mistakes in language, misspelt words and misplaced apostrophes. Most reputable companies, even now, make a point of rejecting applicants for jobs who can’t write a correct English sentence, and it is a fair bet that any letter pretending to come from a bank which says “inconvinience” or “our customers security” is emanating from a crook. If you weren’t paying attention in school, and don’t know whether a phishing email is written in correct English or not, then let’s face it: you deserve to be robbed.

Perhaps the most dramatic reaction came from Lindsay Johns in a Daily Mail column. Johns says of James Daunt’s explanation, “I find that a poor excuse,” and goes on to say,

Next, people will think that it is perfectly acceptable to omit a full stop at the end of a sentence. Then the comma and the semi colon will be unceremoniously dispatched to the grammatical dustbin.

And with them, meaning will be lost and our ability for articulation of the finer points of thought. Our language will be diminished, not augmented.

In short, he concludes: ”Make no mistake. These are dark times for the English language. The barbarians are at the gates. Right now, marauding grammatical Goths are encircling our linguistic Rome.”

What do you think?

 

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

  • http://twitter.com/rtty ben rattigan

    If you cant tell the difference between a word with and without the apostrophe, then you are clearly stupid.

    • Amolibros

      If I were to tell you about my brother’s wives, and put the apostrophe in the wrong place as I just have you will think he is a bigamist, and if I want to infer he was a bigamist, without using an apostrophe I could not do so. So fine, no apostrophe if you can’t be bothered to learn something that enriches your language!

      • http://twitter.com/kromelizard kromelizard

        The apostrophe is not needed to distinguish the possessive from the plural. It took a few centuries after the simplification of the English’s noun declension system resulted in the two forms becoming identical for this use of the apostrophe to even develop.

        You will find, in practice, that it is quite difficult to utter a sentence wherein the two are readily confused. There are no apostrophes in spoken English. It’s only when needing both simultaneously that it can be confusing, and even then it’s not the possessive but the plural that is hard to determine.

        • Amolibros

          I think you’re being too complicated for your own good. It is either my brother’s wives, in which case he is a bigamist, or my brothers’ wives in which case I am alluding to more than one married brother and his wife. In neither instance wuld it be wife, wifes (sic!), wifes’ (sic!) or wive’s! Good grief!

          • Amolibros

            PS: ‘In your chosen instance, you’ve inflected the noun incorrectly. “Wife’s” is singular possessive, “wives” is plural.’ was in the email version I received of your posting 

  • http://twitter.com/rtty ben rattigan

    Hitler invented the apostrophe I think. Lets rejoice at its demise. 

  • http://twitter.com/omtndlsswrds Eric Robert Meckley

    I think the real problem at hand is that the web address of the company is dictating its name, not the other way ’round. The tyranny of the digital world is lording itself over the real one. You can’t use an apostrophe in a twitter hastag, #butthatdoesntmeanIveabandonedthemalltogether. You can’t use spaces there either. Nor can you use them in web addresses. Why is the apostrophe the casualty? I submit they should just go all the way and change their name to:

    waterstonesbookstoresbookstextbooksebooksandereaders

  • Anonymous

     John Richards, the chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society,  ”It’s just plain wrong. It’s grammatically incorrect. If Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s
    can get it right, then why can’t Waterstones. You would really hope
    that a bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English,”
    Nice one, John! (quotation mark)

    Ankles_Protection_Society? (The right one.) Because on the web-naming here, apostrophes arent allowed.
    If this comes up six times, it is because these websites do not inform you if your post has been posted but let it hang in limbo, looking as if nothing has happened.

    • http://mhpbooks.com Melville House Publishing

      That’s because “these websites” — or at least, this one — approves all comments before posting. We don’t just put them up immediately. — Dennis Johnson

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