Apostrophise or you might have to pay the price

“Your back makes me so happy lets barbecue you, Sera and me.” This was the message that pinged me out of my slumbers. First, I was horrified and then I laughed so much that my stomach ached at the thought of getting grilled. The missing apostrophes and commas made a mess of the message. The sentence would sound a wee bit better like this — you’re back! Makes me so happy! Let’s barbecue; you, Sera and I.

Well, I apologise for the above, it was just to show how punctuation matters. It’s “a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.”

When I taught grammar, I always felt that the most essential aspect of learning a language is to gain thorough knowledge about the syntax and communicating coherent messages to the world. While planning lessons and allotting time per topic, I would harp on giving us a greater number of hours for punctuation lessons.

I’d request my students to practise these exercises thoroughly, as I would tell them, “Wrongly punctuated texts will cause mayhem one day, mark my words.” When I read about the catastrophe caused by a missing apostrophe in a recent piece of news, I could feel my prophesy come alive.

Importance of comma

The crux of the whole hullabaloo is that an estate agent from Australia, Anthony Zadravik, ranted out in a post on Facebook-about his former employer. He might have to pay thousands of dollars because he forgot to add an apostrophe in his post:

“Oh Stuart Gan! Selling multi million $ homes in Pearl beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation … Shame on you Stuart!!!2 yrs and still waiting!!” Instead of writing- employee’s or even employees’, he wrote employees.

A defamation case has been slapped against Zadravik and the judge has admitted the case, saying the lack of punctuation in “employees” might be interpreted as a “systematic pattern of conduct”. He added- “To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate.”

There lies Zadrovik, trapped in the web of grammar. I squirm at the number of exclamation marks that he used, he would have surely got detention if he was my pupil.

The ‘apostrophe’ in Greek means “turning away”, hence omission. The English Language picked it up in the 16th century. Classic writers like Shakespeare used it to mark dropped letters. Its life was about to get more complex as, in the 17th century, printers began to insert it before the “s” in singular possessive cases and later they started using it after plural possessives as well.

Languages evolve

I still swear by my grammar book written by Wren and Martin. The Irish nuns who taught us English were hard taskmasters. In an essay that would carry twenty marks, the maximum that one could score was 5, that’s if you were outstanding. They would subtract three marks for each punctuation error. Languages evolve however certain rules should hold their ground forever.

Lynne Truss, the author of ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’ has been fighting the almost lost cause, especially in today’s world where people get away without using punctuation marks on social media.

However, presently she must be chuckling with glee to see how expensive the absence of one punctuation mark has gotten to be. I loved her analogy when she says that we, who are “sensitive sticklers” are like “the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation.” Hilarious anecdotes make the book an interesting read, for the grammar-sensitive and others too.

Reading a piece of text without punctuation marks is like sleeping on a wrought iron bed without a mattress. A punctuation-deficient post can prove to be very expensive. Its official now … oops sorry … it’s official now!

Navanita Varadpande is a writer based in Gurgaon, India. Twitter: @VpNavanita