mccardey asked for a sonnet about feral apostrophes. What mccardey asks for, mccardey sometimes gets.
Sonnet 7: Lines 5 & 10 dont need any more punctuation to make sense, nor does this title
O hail, thou blithe apostrophe
perhaps the most dispensable
of punctuation marks. To thee
I sing, no ode, but sensible
to commenters demand, a sonnet.
What blackboard hath not thee upon it?
Bean’s, tangerine’s and door alarm’s!
I’ll never live down at The Arm’s.
My not-so-smart phone changes its
to it’s. Oh, what I learned at schools
now shrunk to arbitrary rules.
It must be time to call it quits:
though I have loved you, dearest punct-
-uation mark, please go defunct.
Me fail? I fly! 
Yep … I wish more people would follow the rule “when in doubt, leave it out” rather than try to put it in. I find its absence far less distracting than an incorrect presence. I wonder why that is? Absence where it should be is as incorrect as presence where it shouldn’t, and yet bothers me less? Ah, the mysteries of reading and writing.
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I’ve actually memorised this now. You’ve made me very happy…
Thank you.
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mind you, on reflection, I’m kind of wishing I’d asked for real estate…
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wg: Yes, my decades as an editor have made me sympathetic to spelling reform and the abolition of the apostrophe, even as I continue to correct add U to ‘color’ and insert or remove apostrophes. I feel sometimes like a priest who has lost faith in god.
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Yep … I have similar contradictions. Colour, Favour etc MUST have the U. Love your analogy!
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mccardey: I’m flattered to be memorised. You could have asked for real estate, but of course I would have been obliged to invoke the ‘sometimes’ clause and decline the request.
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