I am not bothered by crooked pictures hanging on a wall. Happy slanting, I say. I can land on a sidewalk crack with careless abandon. Nor am I a germ phobic compulsive hand washer. I am made up of thousands of germs. Germs are everywhere. I accept it.
What I have a problem with is: apostrophes. Tiny little curves floating blithely above the march of letters, apostrophes look like something flung them onto the page like a dirty sock. Or a smudge. Or a slip of a pen. They look accidental.
When I write, nothing I do is accidental. I am careful about the words I use. I vary sentence length to create the rhythms I want. I care about the way punctuation affects sentence flow, so I choose my commas carefully. But when my writing calls for a contraction, I balk. Not an apostrophe. For the love of God, anything but an apostrophe.
Apostrophes are like minuscule winged insects unable to make up their minds where they want to settle so they just slouch there, in the air. I do not want to combine words with them; I want to squish or spray them. But, unless I want all my writing to sound like it was authored by Data on Star Trek I am forced to sprinkle them into my prose like parsley.
Having been an art major, I respond powerfully to the visual appearance of words on the page. When I read, I notice how the right margins are evenly aligned. I admire the bold contrast of the dark letters against the white page. I enjoy the consistent visual flow of words. An apostrophe is a visual hiccup that interrupts the flow. I admit to being OCD when it comes to writing. But recently I learned that I am, at least, not alone in hating apostrophes.
There is an impassioned movement to obliterate the apostrophe from the English language. There are websites devoted to it like http://www.killtheapostrophe.com. Apostrophe opponents argue that apostrophes are unnecessary; in speech we get by without them just fine. Even for drawing distinctions between words like “hell” or “he’ll”, readers can usually tell which word is meant by the context. And, despite their feeble usefulness, apostrophes create a painstaking proofreading burden.
Some iconoclastic writers have already let apostrophes go, willing to risk the wrath of the literate community in order to send apostrophes the way of the wooly mammoth. They urge others to dispense with them too, hoping that if enough people go along, eventually everyone will stop using them.
I am not that brave, but I hate apostrophes so much that I go out of my way to avoid them when I can. But avoiding contractions while maintaining a voice that is relaxed and informal is hard work at times. My apostropha-phobia is time-consuming. I try not to think about how much my time spent creating apostrophe-free prose could be limiting my prolificacy. Would that time not be better spent writing new stories?
I dream of going back in time so that I can confront the person who invented the apostrophe. “Sir, I beg of you, stop and think about what you are doing. You are condemning me and countless other writers to flinging punctuation socks against bedposts in the name of grammatical propriety.”
Alas, I have no time machine and no control over the conventions of written language, which were laid down by some highly irresponsible people before I was born. I have to make peace with apostrophes if I want to liberate myself to concentrate on other things like content. Maybe immersion therapy is the answer, showering my prose in apostrophes until, somehow, I learn to love them.
Until then, I will continue to say “cannot” instead of “can’t” and “he will” instead of “he’ll” and wage a violent inner war over every apostrophe I decide to keep, reluctant to conform yet afraid to rebel in an ongoing struggle to write what I love, despite a grammatical tradition I hate.