This blog is brought to you by many letters that you can all read that havent been spellchecked.
I havent blogged in ages. Some of you will not have noticed until I pointed it out. Much like the people doing a wee right now because Waterstones have decided to drop the apostrophe from its name.
These people that are clamouring to have thier say about how it’s “dumbing down”, “just plain wrong”, “utter nonsense”, “as bad as the Holocaust” (I may have made that one up) and a crime against the very literature held hostage on the shelves inside waterstones HEATHEN WALLS probably have never EVER looked at the signage above thier heads as they enter the stores. its only now that it has been pointed out to them (much like every other band wagon led complaint to befall the BBC) that middle England thrusts forth its sodden tena lady to wring out at the feet of the DISBICABLE store and spell out everything that is “WRONG WITH THE COUNTRY” in its acrid puddle.
More fool Waterstones for pointing out the change as they must have KNOWN this would happen, but still….someone on twitter said to me that this change, this dropping of a flick from a sign, this complete and utter NON-EVENT (which is actually MORE accruate seeing as Tim Waterstones has had NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BRAND FOR YEARS) was “a sad indictment of our times”. And it is this type of over-blown, moronic, education-riddled way of looking at writing and THE WORLD that makes me twist and convulse with rage and compete despair.
This tweeter and myself are from backgrounds privaledged enough to have contained enough education to read and write and all the fortune and experience such tools equip human beings with. Our ability and WILLINGNESS to get SO riled by such trivia as a ‘ is an absolute fucking gift and one we should probably feel just a little bit ashamed about.
As I pointed out; Third World AIDs is a “a sad indictment of our times”, the rape and molestation of children by the Catholic CHURCH is a “a sad indictment of our times”, the oppression of women that STILL lingers like a festering corpse in streets up and down the land is a “a sad indictment of our times” gay teens hanging themselves in thier bedrooms because they would rather DIE than face another day at school being tormented for being something they simply ARE is a “a sad indictment of our times”. Slave labour, hidden genocide, starvation, treatable diseases ending in death, the neglect of the elderly are ”a sad indictment of our times”….
Are ablity to STILL understnd a sentance no matta how poorly ritten or spelt or whether someone has used “There” rather than “They’re” is a result of living in a society that provides us with enough education to do so. The fact we would belittle this gift by slamming dictionaries onto the fingers of youngsters because what they have expressed in ink is “WRONG!!!” is like fucking the rest of the world and its issues in the eye, making it apologise and then shitting on its plate. and it makes me deeply, deeply sad.
All the pedants out there who thought for one second this was something worth pissing thier pants about should look at some of the other headlines on the BBC website and count themselves lucky, that whilst flicking, sweaty-pawed, through dictionaries so as not to have any mistake they make in thier FURIOUS COMMENTS lambasted, they are safe in front of a computer, hooked up to Wifi, sipping on a Starbucks, listening to Coldplay, downloading podcasts, firing up the Aga, ordering a Graze box, setting up the Sky box, logging into Waitrose and have nothing…..else…..to worry about…..
I shall leave this blog with a quote from a bookshop worker, which pretty much sums it all up:
“look at how many books i’m buying, i buy so so many books, too many really, i shouldn’t even really be allowed in a bookshop, look at what i’m buying it’s all high quality isn’t it and aren’t you impressed that i read and what am i like and your poetry section isn’t very well stocked is it and where are your classics is that all you have and i’m suprised you don’t have that other one in i asked about it’s been reviewed in all the broadsheets and i’ll throw in one trashy crime book but it’s written by a scandinavian author so that’s okay and i watch danish crime dramas on BBC4 with subtitles and everything and i love reading subtitles because i love reading and don’t get me started on this whole you lot dropping the apostrophe from your name because i’m all for standards and good english and …..OW!! did you just strike me?”
In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter, but the decision itself was made for no other reason than to generate publicity.
I’m one of those annoying people who does get irritated about the misuse of apostrophes, but not to the point where I would march into a shop and shout at the nearest employee. I also readily admit that I miss a few myself when I’m in full stream-of-consciousness mode. It frustrates me in much the same way as a driver not using their indicators on a roundabout, or someone using their mobile phone in a cinema. I imagine very few people do any of these things with the explicit reason of getting under someone’s skin.
I’m not the greatest writer, the best driver or the most versed in etiquette, yet I still manage to get through life without making such trivial mistakes. In return I probably more than make up for them with bigger mistakes.
I’m pretty sure I learnt how to use apostrophes from just reading from a young age. I may have been told something about them at school, but I don’t remember any ‘formal training’ on the subject. It’s really not a difficult thing to understand and I often despair at how wrong some people get it. I often wonder if they have similar problems with tying their shoelaces or have moments when they forget how to blink. The rule of thumb for these people seems to actually be the reverse of this decision, namely if you’re not sure just add an apostrophe anyway.
I think this particular decision makes the least sense overall. A company that sells books, partly with the aim of getting people to read and expand their minds, is effectively saying that they’re breaking the rules of the English language to make their business more accessible.
When I worked for Waterstone’s, I genuinely had to deal with the occasional cocky teenager who would ask me what a ‘waterstone’ was. With this decision I imagine you’ll shortly be dealing with oh-so-clever adults asking the same question, and I imagine it will continue long after the news of the change has faded.
OK, so to you it doesn’t matter but when there is nothing else to focus on it does.
Drivers who dont use indicators are putting other people in danger, people using a mobile phone in a cinema are being antisocial and prohibiting you from hearing the film. There are very, VERY, few incidents where the correct use an apostrophe is so VITAL it may cause absolute mayham if used wrongly. Say in a war time message about bombs or something – that would be pretty vital. In our sloppy, day to day lives, it shouldn’t matter a jot (a jot being all that it is). The very fact you call the mistake “trivial” makes me want to shake you and yell “WELL LET IT GO THEN!!” and focus on those “bigger mistakes” that are occuring all the time with no eyelid bothered.
Many kids are absoluetly terrified by coming into the bookshop as it is so far away from thier comfort zones. All this fear cooked up in classrooms or by parents who berate (no matter how gently) each failing they make. No-one picks up a crudely drawn stick man picture by a 5 year old decrying its complete lack of anatomical correctness, but many will pick up a story or a thank you card and go “Oh darling…silly billy…that little dot doesnt go there…it doesnt matter now how much you really liked the toys santa got you… In fact, we should probably give those toys to some other BETTER child shouldnt we….I think we’ll just pop this in the bin over here….daddy will never have to see it.” On a daily basis I hear parents demanding that thier offspring put down Wimpy Kid and pick up something “proper” that “you will get something out of”. I have nearly bitten through my tongue trying not to scream “HE WILL GET SOMETHING OUT OF WIMPY KID YOU UTTER BINT! HE WILL GET A COMPLETE AND UTTER UNTOUCHABLE LOVE OF BOOKS” but no…
A company selling books and who have words as the basis of thier trade are the ONLY people who CAN make such dramatic changes to the way we see the written world and Im all for it. The internet is the next evolutionary step for language and waterstones is being bold enough to embrace this new wave in communication. The fact people are getting so upset about this shows a complete lack of knowledge about the nature of language and how it shifts and changes. You would probably have been deemed hideously working class and beneath many people just because of the way you speak not that long ago, please let us move our written words out from this pool of derision as well.
As a slightly facetious and probably inaccurate side note (but who ever cared about accuracy when they were being pedantic? [that was the facetious bit {actually there's quite a bit more to come}]), it makes sense to get rid of the apostrophe. Waterstones is a company name which gives it a right to enjoy some of its own rules; it isn’t its own academic essay and neither is poetry or the prose of novels. Many company names have purposefully odd spellings and weird punctuation. As long as we understand it and that the design of the brand, including the spelling and the punctuation, conveys something about that brand, then it’s absolutely fine. Again, it isn’t an academic essay. Waterstones doesn’t need to see me after class.
So originally we had Waterstone’s in the genitive case. Why? The only reason I can think of as to why they needed this was to indicate possession of the fact that this was a bookshop and that it belonged to a man named Mr. Waterstone – i.e. it was a shorthand way of saying Mr. Waterstone’s Bookshop. So you’re part of the marketing team for Waterstones, and you’re thinking, we want something snappier that can in time come to represent the brand. So you lop off all the non-essential words but retain the grammar as if the words you had lopped off still existed, so we get a sort of silent:
(Mr) Waterstone’s (Bookshop)
(notice how in the above paragraph, I use the historical present as well as progressive constructions – an increasing trend today where I use present tense forms of verbs to talk about the past, even though the past tense is available to me to use if I had wanted to, and how I purposefully use progressive constructions to convey a particular tone, even though traditionally these decisions might be “incorrect”, whatever that means).
Retaining the grammar but lopping off the words is very common in branding. As the brand builds over time, these silent words increase their silence*. Eventually the bookshop becomes something that we can actually call just Waterstones because this has now become a NEW WORD which symbolises all the things that Waterstones stands for, such as paying their staff an excellent wage and allowing them to wear flattering uniforms. When we actually talk about Waterstones, you never complete the sentence in your head, you never say the following brackets silently in your head afterwards “Oh, I’m just off out to Waterstones (the bookshop)”. You never really feel that you are talking about “Waterstone’s Bookshop” – it definitely feels as if simply “Waterstones” is enough; that it embodies everything about the place that you are going to, so it makes complete sense to get rid of this apostrophe. We don’t have to understand any of this or to understand the grammar of the past. We just have to be aware that it is the nature of language for things to always be changing. Old and Middle English had different personal pronouns to the ones we used now. No doubt 13th century twits mourned this Frenchifying modification of their language; meanwhile all the hip, creative, world-changing people continued to use these new pronouns without giving it a second thought. To sit back and say: “Oh I’m not having this. This is not how it USED TO BE” is at least as stupid as Tess Daly.
(*notice how technically it’s not possible for “silence” to increase in any way, so that that sentence is effectively not logical, but I used it anyway. Why?)
I am in control of what I am wanting to communicate and I can subvert it accordingly. Grammar isn’t in control of me. I describe things naturally that reflects the world I am living in. I don’t artificially describe things to try and keep step with rules which are themselves constantly shifting; rules which are actually defined collectively by the way people use them rather than as pre-written things carved on a rock by God.
I really believe that, even give that we continue to live in a world in which Tess Daly regularly speaks, this Waterstones apostrophe lark is quite possibly the least interesting thing to have ever happened. When I read about it I immediately started thinking about eating paint because the way it would make me feel would at least have some degree of interesting to it. What’s the point of writing? Is it to assert class privileges? To display a certain (false) intellectual superiority? Or is it above all, to communicate?
Some more points about the above comments. @grayhaze, you wrote:
“I’m pretty sure I learnt how to use apostrophes from just reading from a young age….
You may well have. A lot of people don’t. I didn’t. I read a lot from a young age and continued to use apostrophes “erroneously”, perhaps until my third year at university. And many other aspects of English grammar I didn’t really grasp until I started teaching it. I still don’t think I know enough now. I don’t think this indicates anything about a lack of intelligence, but perhaps a presence of laziness, which is a separate and distinct quality from the stupidity you imply.
“….It’s really not a difficult thing to understand and I often despair at how wrong some people get it. I often wonder if they have similar problems with tying their shoelaces or have moments when they forget how to blink. The rule of thumb for these people seems to actually be the reverse of this decision, namely if you’re not sure just add an apostrophe anyway”.
I think you’re dangerously at risk of dipping your toes into a Waitrosean pool of smug here. Clearly it IS a difficult thing to understand given that a lot of people don’t use it correctly – this is self-evident. Not everyone grows up reading lots of books, for an infinite number of reasons. The greengrocer doesn’t wake up in the morning, eat a dozen egg’s (I’m being hilarious) and then sit there and figure out just how stupid he can be that day. He’s not wilfully stupid. He isn’t, I might add, even objectively stupid. The tone of the quotes above leave an image in my mind of you reclining on some faux-archaic chair going “Oh these pesky stupid people, how much despair they induce in one!” My mother and my brother don’t understand completely how to use apostrophes, and often ask me about this and other grammar issues when they have to write reports for their work. Both of them lead quite successful lives (more successful than mine) and live their world unstupidly. Now that I come to think of it, they are also both avid readers. They do not lead their lives in stupid fashion and their occasional misuse of the apostrophes says nothing about any aspect of their lives whatsoever. It’s as insignificant as the fact that I don’t like poached eggs. “Oh, do you know how to use an apostrophe?” “No I don’t. But I don’t like poached eggs”. “I guess we’re even then”. Yes we are. You and I only know about it because we are relatively “literary” and take an interest in these sorts of things. A lot of people don’t, and I don’t think that fact alone makes us better people than them.
NB. That I can knock out several words of bum chunder on this topic yet still find myself unable to summon up the effort to research politics enough to be able to meaningfully vote or commit to opinions on any sort of topic with some semblance of conviction, is a billion times more depressing that the disappearance of an apostrophe. Our generation’s trademark is an ironic disinterest in all the terrible things that are happening in the world and a shift in focus to the banal and shit. No one particularly cares or does anything when huge changes happen that affect us all or affect other parts of the world, they just riot under the pretence of politics and steal trainers. The most important decision I’ll ever make is whether to get the iphone 4 or wait for the iphone 5, or write a billion words on pissing apostrophes. It is incredibly, aggressively, unimportant. But important enough for me to spend a morning talking about it when I have several far more meaningful and urgent things I need to be doing. And so this ends in an ironic, self-destroying circle that obliterates any ferocity of sentiment that might have appeared in the preceding lines. Insert closing pun involving greengrocers and apostrophes here: