Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

Waterstone’s are now Waterstones. They’ve decided to drop the apostrophe. I was asked to go on World at One today to discuss this with John Humphrys. John’s position is that the apostrophe saves us from some ambiguity and this is a good thing. Anything that saves us from some ambiguity is a good thing. What’s more, there are rules. All we have to do is learn the rules. I don’t want to misrepresent him, so apologies if I have.

My position is that the apostrophe is on the way out. It’s an inconsistent item anyway; it was invented by printers - not grammarians or linguists - and like a lot of other ‘rules’ of punctuation is modified by use. No bad thing.