Punctuation has limited material or spiritual benefits, except perhaps for editors, lawyers and some mechanically-inclined English teachers. Yet it seems to rise to cosmic importance occasionally in my Facebook community and even in the world news. I draw the line at apostrophes, however.

A grammar-obsessed vigilante — dubbed the “Banksy of punctuation” — is on a mission to put a full stop on rogue apostrophes in the UK, according to a report. The anonymous crusader risks doing jail time to roam the street at night, scrubbing grammatical miscues from businesses around Bristol, he told the BBC. “It’s more of a crime to have the apostrophes wrong in the first place,” he said.

What can you say about a crusader who defends the honor of apostrophes?  So gallant to protect the small and vulnerable? So selfless to edit without reward? So civil-minded to remove offense from the view of editors and proofreaders?  Do we all sleep better, knowing that apostrophes have found their place before or after the “s” or have been dislodged from their obscene pluralization’s [sic]?  Does this crusade touch our deep anguish for distasteful signage? Or is this obsessive-compulsive disorder under the veneer of cultivation?

This is a mark of punctuation that can be mistaken for a fleck on the page. A mark that hangs in space, swaying between letters that seem to disown it. An ambiguous mark that could mean a contraction, a plural, a possession, a plural possession, or, in its absence, a case of pronoun possession:

“It’s hard to know when ‘it’s’ loses its apostrophe.”

(In this example of a contraction (it is) and a pronoun possessive (its), the single quotation marks around “it’s” look suspiciously like apostrophes, adding to our despair.)

Some people find this exercise entertaining. They are variously called grammarians, linguists, grammar- Nazis, lawyers or obsessive proofreaders. They should be allowed their harmless recreations unless they inflict them on the casual and the carefree, the contented abusers of hanging commas. Then their obsession becomes our neurosis. We find apostrophes flitting through our prose with alarming inconsistency. We are haunted by the plural possessives and the plurals disguised as contractions. We pause, we parse, we puzzle, we perspire with perplexity.

And when these apostro-plectic crusaders afflict us with their preoccupation, I am driven to my own crusade: the banishment of apostrophes from English. After decades of circling “its” and “it’s” on student writing at every level of secondary and tertiary education, I am convinced the world would be a better place without apostrophes.

There are many languages which seem well-off without apostrophes. There are many devoted students of the English language who are still befuddled by them. There are many pluralized nouns that have been contaminated by them. There are many more cases of overuse than underuse of the annoying specks. There are many flecks on white paper that have been mistaken for them.

I cannot imagine how the absence of an apostrophe would confound my interpretation of a writer’s message. If I wrote “writers message,” I would have no trouble recognizing that phrase as a possessive, rather than a plural.  It only looks wrong, because we are conditioned to expect apostrophes. If I wanted multiple writers to have a message, I would say “writers messages” or the “message of many writers.” Without the apostrophe, plurals and possessives are identified by their context, the same way a programmed spell-checker recognizes and corrects them. The presence or absence of an apostrophe will never change how we pronounce words or interpret their intended use. How do we know that a word pronounced as “writers” in conversation is a plural or possessive? By its context in the sentence, not its spelling.

As for contractions, we know that “didnt” means “did not”, whether we acknowledge the absent “o” or not. If we abbreviate a word, for example as “Mr,” we don’t have to place an apostrophe to note the absence of four letters. We accept that the word can be abbreviated and pronounce it as if the letters were present. Contractions are nothing more than a special case of abbreviation.  The apostrophe is symbolic, but unnecessary.

The abolition of the apostrophe would save numerous characters in a manuscript, would acknowledge in written language what is already true in spoken language, would end the confusion of millions of writers of English, would relieve the wearisome labor of English teachers and editors, would save a week of language instruction in every academic year, and eliminate three pages of every stylebook for the end-users of English. The efficiency of the move is so mind-boggling, it is unfathomable what would prevent it.

Oh, yes, I forgot about the “Banksy of punctuation,” the ranters bereft of a reliable rant, the editors and lawyers whose work might be de-mystified, and the purists who declare wholesale change in English as moral depravity or, at best, sheer laziness. If this is the full catalogue of victims of the apostrophic rebellion, then I consider them collateral damage.

Its a pleasure to lay their troubled spirits to rest.