Waterstones’ apostrophe: a victim of rebranding

We’ve been here before — with Birmingham City Council and assorted businesses and place names — and we’ll be here again. A prominent organisation, this time Waterstones, has officially dropped the apostrophe from its name, sparking outrage from self-anointed protectors of the language.

Waterstones’ managing director James Daunt said: (PDF)

Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling. It also reflects an altogether truer picture of our business today which, while created by one, is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers.

This seems entirely reasonable to me. The fact that it’s a bookseller, of course, compounds the agony for the is-nothing-sacred crowd, who last year worked themselves into a state of pseudo-grief and fury over the non-death of the serial comma, and who now protest this latest insult on Twitter and Facebook and in comments on news websites.

John Richards, of the Apostrophe Protection Society, is predictably unhappy with Waterstones: “You would really hope that a bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English.” If the quote is accurate, his use of slapdash is itself slapdash: the word means hasty or careless, and I’m quite sure Waterstones are being anything but.

Martin MacConnol, in a sensible post about the furore, points out that Waterstones’ name “is a brand mark, and thus doesn’t follow the normal rules of grammar”. David Marsh at the Guardian says it’s “no catastrophe”. But he recommends carrying a felt-tip pen and Tipp-Ex to tackle public lapses in punctuation, à la Lynne Truss, which sounds like a recipe for hypercorrection and Pedantry Gone Wild.

One blogger, whose identity I’ll spare, lamented the news thus:

So now you know: apostrophes that used to feature in Waterstone’s will shuffle off to reappear in genitive its — as if to spite me. They might also find a niche in the aberrant “s-form” Tesco’s (from Tesco), which Lorraine Woodward studied in her interesting dissertation “The supermarket storm: an investigation into an aspect of variation”.

My favourite reaction was from Waterstones of Oxford Street, whose Twitter account posted the photo below (cropped; source unknown), followed by a series of faux-poignant tweets about the apostrophe’s last day at work with the company. “A victim of rebranding”, indeed.

By the standards of common punctuation marks, the apostrophe has had a short existence bedevilled by instability and inconsistency. As Christina Cavella and Robin Kernodle’s paper “How the Past Affects the Future: The Story of the Apostrophe” (PDF) shows, there has always been disagreement and uncertainty about how best to use it.

So no, this is nothing to get upset about, and language is not going to the dogs. The fuss over Waterstones’ dropped apostrophe will soon blow over for all but a few committed sticklers, to be relived next time a big brand or institution puts pragmatism over fastidious punctuation. Best get used to it.

Updates:

Two excellent posts on Waterstones and the use and history of the apostrophe: Michael Rosen explores the politics of punctuation [via]; and David Crystal notes that English writing did fine for almost a millennium without the mark.

John E. McIntyre weighs in at You Don’t Say (subscription). Apostrophe usage is “a mess and a muddle”, he writes, and resolving it all is “a doomed venture”. So we shouldn’t fret over brands and signs and menus but instead focus on our own writing. He concludes with a fine line — “You can’t weed the world, but you can cultivate your garden” — that echoes an analogy by C. S. Lewis I wrote about recently.

In my post, I avoided linking to any (of the many) tiresome, end-is-nigh reactions to this story. But Mark Liberman at Language Log has gone a different and amusing route, ironically playing up the Daily Mail‘s apocalyptic panic by recruiting no less a barbarian than Shakespeare.

Also at Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum rejects the argument that apostrophes are needed to avoid ambiguity. He finds it sad and irritating that people

[try] to represent themselves as educated thinking defenders of the English language by mouthing off cluelessly about grammatical topics, voicing allegations about “incorrectness” and “ambiguity” that cannot withstand even a few seconds of thought. There is nothing whatever about the decision on the new Waterstones trade name that relates to grammar or grammatical error at all.

Link love: language (32)

Language-related links I liked lately, and you might too:

Encounters with biblio-amnesia.
An introduction to Blissymbols (PDF).
Nabokov on synaesthesia and the colours of the alphabet.
Railspeak should be terminated.
Spoken style correction: the iPeeve™.
Top punctuation boffins sort out the multiple shriek stop!!!!!
ScriptSource: documenting the world’s writing systems.
History of the ampersand, part 1, part 2, part 2½.
The linguistic history of Venice.
Swedish pre-school drops gendered pronouns (and Cinderella).
New research into how children learn their first words.
The 72-word door, or, the legacy of Webster’s Third.
Are swear words appropriate in the ‘sacred space’ of Russian theatre?
Glossary of new medical slang.
The evolution of English: an interactive timeline.
Humblebragging.

[Links archive]

Link love: language (31)

A grab-bag of language-related links that caught my eye lately:

Conjugating the Werewolf.

The problem with cutesy voices.

Anglo-EU translation guide.

On -ise and -ize.

Capitalisation in E. E. Cummings’ name.

Etymology of newfangled and pagan.

Estuary English in the 21st century.

Why do French babies cry differently to German babies?

University of Chicago completes its Assyrian/Akkadian Dictionary.

Slang, the poetry of everyday life (PDF).

The dramatic history of the letter H.

England’s regional accents continue to move and mutate.

Word usage predicts romantic attraction: report, paper (PDF).

The Internet Archive’s physical archive of books.

A world without standardised/-ized spelling.

Using commas with appositives.

Catalog or catalogue? A library dilemma. (PDF)

“Scobberlotchers.”

Late entry: Index of garbledness as a cyptographic tool.

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[links archive]

Dogma discerned; metaphor mulled over

Two items for your attention, the second in several parts. First: ‘This is where you get to be a bigot’, written by John E. McIntyre on his excellent You Don’t Say blog at the Baltimore Sun. Mr McIntyre explains when dogma is justifiable and when it is mere bigotry buttressed by popular but misinformed opinion:

Education in grammar and usage and the popular understanding of these matters have been damaged by the dogmatic rigidity of teachers and the peeving class: the insistence that there is only one “proper” form of English, the standard written; adherence to a set of “rules,” many of them bogus; and an implied and unwarranted belief that upholding such standards constitutes intellectual, social, and moral superiority.

I recommend that you read the full post if you haven’t already; it is short, witty, and thoroughly sound.

Second: You might have seen my recent flurry of articles about metaphor for Macmillan Dictionary Blog. If you didn’t, and you’re curious, I’ve collected them here. I mention them again because metaphor is receiving a lot of attention in the news media at the moment after IARPA, a US intelligence research agency, announced its intention to begin a five-year “Metaphor Program” [PDF, 351 KB] in November.

The project, according to IARPA, “will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture.” Michael Cooney summarises the story, Alexis Madrigal takes a closer look in the Atlantic, while Lane Greene adds his thoughts in the Economist.

Michael Rosen is more sceptical, suggesting that “the more [the spooks] pin down and describe a metaphor, the more they will find that they have pinned down and described themselves”.

One to keep an eye on. Metaphorically.

Amondawa has no word for ‘time’?

“There is nothing lineal or sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness” – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

A recurring idea in popular discussions of languages – usually exotic or minority ones – is that they have “no word for X”, where X could be hello, tomorrow, burger, ten, accountability, robin, and so on. Sometimes it’s sheer fantasy, sometimes the language simply has (or has had) no need for the word (robins in the Arctic?), and sometimes it has other ways of conveying the idea – such as a longer phrase, a different kind of metaphor, or another syntactic category.

The point is, it’s not as though there’s a nagging word-shaped gap there that makes it difficult for speakers of a language to communicate with one another, to make sufficient sense of their experiences, and to get through the day without falling apart. If there’s a need for a word, a word will arise.

Irish has no word for yes, but this linguistic lacuna does not stop Irish speakers from agreeing, accepting, assenting, and shouting things in bed. Other idioms and grammatical markers are used instead. The lack of a word for something doesn’t imply the lack of a concept for it, yet this illogical extrapolation is repeatedly made, perhaps for reasons of naïveté, sensationalism, or romanticism, e.g., the appeal of a culture with no word for lying, and other spins on the “noble savage” myth.

The no-word-for-X trope belongs to the more general faddish idea of a language or culture having N words for X, where N is, as Mark Liberman writes, “either zero or some number viewed as excessively large”; he goes on to discuss “the mind-clouding power of this rhetorical device”. It certainly seems to exert a strong and sometimes stupefying effect on people.

Many of us speak multiple languages, or we did once, or we know people who do, so occasional interlinguistic imprecision is a familiar notion. But when we encounter a language that supposedly has no word for Something Very Fundamental, some concept we assume to be universal, we are beguiled. What do they think like, we wonder, these exotic creatures who have no word for X. We want to be not so much a fly on the wall as a homunculus in the brain of someone very different from us – to test drive their mind for a while.

Yesterday the BBC announced that the Amondawa language “has no word for ‘time’”. The headline declares, rather boldly: “Amondawa tribe lacks abstract idea of time, study says”, but a more accurate description might be that it appears to lack an abstract term for time. The report follows a paper published in Language and Cognition titled “When Time is not Space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture.” It’s available here [PDF].*

One of the authors, Chris Sinha, Professor of Psychology of Language at the University of Portsmouth, anticipates romantic misinterpretations when he stresses that the researchers are “really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’”. Time, after all, is inescapable; in the words of science fiction writer Ray Cummings, it’s “what keeps everything from happening at once”. Sinha’s comment echoes a point made in the paper’s discussion:

“On Language” on hiatus

I was surprised and disappointed to learn that the New York Times Magazine has suspended its On Language column. For decades the responsibility of William Safire (1929–2009), it has in recent times been written by linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer. Ben is no stranger to these pages and will be familiar to regular visitors to Language Log, the Visual Thesaurus, and Vocabulary.com.

Too often we read in a headlong rush for facts, conclusions and essential meaning. With good writers we slow down, savouring the care and craft in their prose. Writing well is not easy, but a skilled hand makes it look effortless. Ben’s writing on language isn’t just well written: it’s reliably interesting and illuminating, sharing language lore with enthusiasm, humour, an awareness of historical development and a sense of future possibilities.

There’s a song lyric I like, by Modest Mouse: “Language is the liquid that we’re all dissolved in – / Great for solving problems, after it creates a problem.” As I wrote in an email to the NYT Magazine editor, many problems and much strife owe to miscommunication and misunderstanding; Ben’s efforts, wherever they appear, stand in direct opposition to linguistic confusion.

I’ve linked to many On Language articles in my Link love posts and on Twitter, and I miss them now that the column is on indefinite hiatus. I hope those responsible see the sense in restarting it soon. The last article was about the future of language. There’s a link in the first line of this post, or you can find it in the archive, which also appears in the sidebar of this blog (down a bit from Word Routes, Ben’s blog at the VT).

If you want to share your thoughts with the editors at the New York Times, their email addresses are here, courtesy of John E. McIntyre. There’s also a Facebook group called Keep “On Language” in the New York Times. There’s a good idea.

Update: Jesse Sheidlower has published, with permission, an email from the NYT Magazine editor.

Link love: language (27)

Friday is a good day for links. Here are a few that recently caught my eye and stayed in mind.

The passive in English.

The joy of indefinite words.

Hunting the Spotted Hiybbprqag Mountweazel.

Headless compounds and the grammar of the Maple Leafs.

Good-bye, Good Luck, and Godspeed: On linguistic (de)secularisation.

An illustrated history of the pop-up book.

The QWERTY Effect: How stereo-typing shapes the mental lexicon (PDF, 434 KB).

The lost art of book editing.

Traumgedanken: a book as a model of a dream about dreaming.

How word length is related to information content.

The Macquarie Dictionary words of the year.

Leaken: German language Anglicism of the year.

The politics of language in African literature.

Is it -ize, -ise, or -yse?

Decoding political metaphors.

Open Language Archives Community.

‘All’s I know…’

[links archive]