168
Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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As you might have gleaned from my comment, everyone uses language differently. Very differently. Scots vs. English kind of differently and that's not even covering all autochthone minorities. To make sure the whole country has a way to understand each other we need to agree on a standard that's half-way acceptable and half-way convenient to everyone. In setting that standard, why should we follow the practices of simple but bold businessmen ("Lara's hair stylez") over newspapers. One knows stuff about hair and not so much language, the other knows quite a bit about language and less about hair. Why are we asking plumbers how to bake bread and bakers how to fix faucets. Explain it to me.
Some questions: Is it your position that people can't understand each other when using this apostrophe? Are you saying that only business people use this apostrophe? And are you saying that the only people who can be trusted to correctly use language are those at newspapers?
No, no, and no.
The question is whether what's understood as the standard is set by bowing to random influence from people being careless or plain uninformed, or by reference to how people specialising in the thing do it.
This whole thing is just a declaration of bankruptcy on part of the standards body because the natural authorities of the language -- and that's editors, not barkeeps -- will not be adopting this one. They also prevented some details about the 1996 spelling reform, while adopting the rest: In the end it was the reform that bent to the editors, not the editors bending to the standards body.
You're talking about "But shouldn't randos be free to choose how they spell things" -- yes, and they are. And the rest of the republic is free to consider that usage wrong, especially if those randos didn't choose a spelling, but simply didn't care. The standards body saying "hey shouldn't this be right" has no authority over the opinion of the rest of the republic we're not in France.