Richard Nordquist / About.com

The peculiar phenomenon of recklessly apostrophized plurals is nothing new. Lynne Truss’s prescriptive ancestors were ridiculing “grocer’s” back in the 19th century. And though apparently simple, the guidelines for using the apostrophe have been eccentrically applied since the mark first popped up in the 1500s. As editor Tom McArthur notes in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), “There was never a golden age in which the rules for the use of the possessive apostrophe in English were clear-cut and known, understood, and followed by most educated people.”

With customary reserve and indecision, we’ve declined to take sides in the Great Apostrophe Debate. But we would like to hear whether you think the apostrophe is worth preserving.

Pikes Peak, named after explorer Zebulon Pike, lost its apostrophe in 1891. That was the year that the newly formed U.S. Board on Geographic Names outlawed this seemingly innocent mark of punctuation: “The possessive form using an ‘s’ is allowed,” declared the Board, “but the apostrophe is almost always removed.”

Some would be quite happy to broaden the ban on that “morbid growth in English orthography,” as linguist Steven Byington characterized the mark. Writing in American Speech in 1945, he observed that “the language would be none the worse for its abolition.”

More recently, in an article bluntly titled “Axing the Apostrophe,” Adrian Room argued that apostrophes are simply unnecessary. So what, he said, if “we’ll” appears as “well” or “he’ll” as “hell.” Context, he insisted, “should soon show which word is meant, and grammatical parameters would make ambiguity unlikely” (English Journal, 1989).

Another knowledgeable opponent of apostrophes (those “uncouth bacilli,” in George Bernard Shaw’s words) is English teacher Peter Brodie, who also advocates abolition: “they are largely decorative, like the French circumflex, and–unlike the comma–rarely clarify meaning” (English Journal, 1995).

And just last month, Dr. John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College, London, dismissed the apostrophe as “a waste of time.” Speaking at the centenary dinner of the Spelling Society, he asked, “Have we really nothing better to do with our lives than fret about the apostrophe?”