The genteel Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate is more often in the news as one of the happiest places in the UK to live. However, this past week it was at the centre of a teacup-sized storm about… punctuation! North Yorkshire council has announced all new street signs will use of phase the apostrophe from street names, mostly because they are difficult for online geographical databases to recognise.
It’s a move that “riles the blood” of local residents, which is of some comfort to this columnist, who also happens to be a teacher of English. But does it matter to most of you? Should we still care about spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG)?
“I gotta go toilet,” says one of my Croydon-based family members, grammatical gloop that less “riles the blood”, but more “boils the piss”. Is it snobbery to battle the misuse of language? Do we accept that language is ever changing, or are the rules worth fighting for? One person’s slang is another’s vernacular. But I am not arguing about the wonderful rich dialects of the English language, but instead punctuation: how we make sense of our writing; and grammar: how different words fit together.
A trigger warning: some readers may soon come out in hives recalling school English lessons. The most emblematic example of the punctuation debate I can think of is surely familiar to generations of pupils: “let’s eat Grandma” versus “let’s eat, Grandma”. Hopefully, class, we are all clear about the difference one humble comma makes. However, let’s go further and remove the apostrophe: “lets eat Grandma”. The sentence no longer makes sense. It’s exaggeration to make a point, but we should care about that point.
What do you think of types like Piers Morgan who point out “it’s you’re”, when haters troll him online with “your a twat, Morgan”? Is the correction even more twattish? Does it matter if people confuse their there with their they’re?
Obviously, English is not a phonetic language. There are countless examples of words with different spellings that are pronounced exactly the same way: homophones, like the above, or flower and flour. It is complex and difficult to understand. Surely, the richness that gave us Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, Angelou and George the Poet is worth fighting for. Yes, many of our greatest writers messed with the rules – indeed Shakespeare created thousands of new words. However, nearly all iconoclasts in any discipline first learn the structural rules they subsequently break.
So, I claim to be training future iconoclasts by articulating my list of pet hates. The trouble is, reciting that list takes half a lesson. Here’s my current top three: 3. full stops and capital letters – so basic, but they largely disappeared post a pandemic during which pupils only wrote text speak; 2. “Could of” instead of “could have”. 1. Apostrophe’s on plural’s. The last one has become so ubiquitous as to go almost unnoticed.
Some people might argue that to even have this debate is elitist, but I would argue that SPaG matters to our essential ability to communicate with each other through written language. It will become a skill of the elites unless we are careful.
Teachers of English like me cannot let it go, but children are in English classes a fraction of their school week and in school a fraction of their lives. They live on their phones so much more; which means “text speak” is nigh on ubiquitous. It’s a daunting trend to overcome, but if we care about our language then we must all fight the battle together.