Dear members,
Welcome to the July 2024 newsletter from the Apostrophe Protection Society. As always, thank you for being members and for supporting the APS. If you're a new member, I've already welcomed you with a separate email, but I'll welcome you again here. Welcome!
It's been a relatively quiet time for the APS since the last newsletter. The excitement around the North Yorkshire Council street names issue has completely died down following the council's decision to abandon their plan to remove apostrophes from new road signs. If you missed the excitement, you can catch up by reading the May 2024 newsletter on the "Newsletters & Blogs" page on the website. I've not had any further reports of other UK councils proposing to do the same, so hopefully we're ok for now. But please let me know if you become aware of any other UK county councils doing incorrect things with apostrophes. If you're not in the UK, it's a rather different position. As I've noted in a previous newsletter, the USA (for example) officially doesn't use possessive apostrophes in any place names except for five specific cases - Martha's Vineyard (Massachusetts), Ike's Point (New Jersey), John E's Pond (Rhode Island), Carlos Elmer's Joshua View (Arizona), and Clark's Mountain (Oregon). I'm not sure of the official position regarding apostrophes in place names in other English-speaking countries - perhaps members can let me know.
Next month, August 15th brings us International Apostrophe Day. While it could be argued that every day is a good day to celebrate the apostrophe, the 15th is a particularly notable day for our favourite piece of punctuation. International Apostrophe Day was created by David Marsh, a copy editor at the Guardian newspaper, in 2011, and I'm pleased to commemorate it once again. I'm going to try to get some media coverage for International Apostrophe Day, so let me know if you see any.
I'm delighted to announce that we reached an amazing membership milestone of 4000 members in July! Thank you to every one of you for making this happen. When I revived the APS back in 2022, and then introduced membership in January 2023, I thought that hitting a membership of 100 would be pretty good, so I'm overwhelmed that membership has grown so much. Of course, I'd be even more delighted to bump that membership total up further, so if you know anyone else who would like to join, please suggest to them that they do so.
I'm pleased to see that T-shirt orders through the APS store have continued to keep us in the top seller list. There's also fully APS-branded mugs available that are perfect for that morning cup of coffee or an afternoon cup of tea! See the "Store" page on the APS website for details of both of these.
It's always good to see different ways of celebrating the apostrophe, so I'm grateful to one of our members in Australia for making me aware of "The Apostrophe Song". You can find it on YouTube here -
There's also a hip-hop version that's worth listening to -
I think that's all for this edition of the newsletter. As always, thank you for being members - it helps to give the APS credibility, and I really appreciate your support. Please keep emailing me with examples of apostrophe abuse around the English-speaking world.
Best wishes,
Bob