fling93 loves fishies

Grammar Wars

Kevin Drum takes on the great evil menacing our society: the mighty apostrophe. The Telegraph argues for correct punctuation:

...punctuation makes it easier to plot your way through the highways and byways of the English language.

Kevin responds:

...it is 100% wrong for the apostrophe, a piece of punctuation that serves no purpose at all. The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused

Aside from the important distinction between singular and plural possessives, I think apostrophes serve another purpose: making it easier for the human brain to identify a word. The brain actually doesn't parse every single letter in the word before it recognizes it; it looks at the overall word shape.

Nerds out there probably saw this when it made the rounds a while back, but Slashdot had a cool story on how scrambled words can still be readable:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.' Jamie Zawinski has also written a perl script to convert normal text into text where letters excluding the first and last are scrambled."

The perl script makes a neat toy:

Tdaoy I siengd a proioatalcmn edinng the treproamy setel seruagafd mauesres I put in pcale in Mrach 2002. Poirr to taht tmie, steel pirces were at 20-yaer lows and the U.S. Itanitaonrnel Tdare Cioommissn fnoud that a sgrue in iopmrts to the U.S. mekrat was cusinag srouies ijnruy to our dsomietc seetl itnudsry.

I took atcion to give the isutdnry a canhce to asdujt to the sgrue in feirogn ipromts and to give rlieef to the wrkoers and cnimmuitoes that dnpeed on setel for tehir jbos and lioloivehds.

Tsehe sarufgaed mueaesrs have now aveceihd tehir psporue, and as a rselut of ceghnad eioomcnc cancsterciums it is tmie to lfit tehm.

It's harder to read, but still readable, perhaps because the general shape of the word is kinda almost the same. It's much easier when you put, to quote Radiohead, everything in its right place. Including apostrophes.

Besides, if you really want to simplify English...

You will have no more problems with our English! The European Commission have just announced an agreement whereby ENGLISH will be the official language of the EU rather than GERMAN which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish":

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double leters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"'s in the languag is disgrasful, and they should go away.

By the 4th yar, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!!

Yah, I no zat's an oldie, too. It's aktualy starting to mak ze runds agan viz Schwarzeneger replasing ze European Komision.