Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
FULL STOP FOR APOSTROPHES
Warning on slump in punctuation mark
THE apostrophe could soon become a thing of the past after experts revealed that its usage has plunged.
The humble mark indicates possession or the omission of letters. But the biggest ever study of how English has changed found it has rapidly declined in the past 30 years.
Lancaster University’s Dr Vaclav Brezina, whose team looked at 100 million words to spot trends, said: “The most striking thing is how informal language has become.
“There has been a noticeable drop in apostrophes.”
He added the punctuation mark change was prompted by social media sites. Dr Brezina added: “The question is how much more time will it take for this to extend to elsewhere?”
Experts analysed how many times a word was used in the early 90s compared with now.
They found there has been an 8% decrease in apostrophes after a plural noun – such as birds’ beaks – from 308.47 uses per million to 282.88.
The study added informal words such as “it’s” instead of “it is” have almost doubled.
Modal verbs including “shall”, “must” and “may” are down by 60%, 40% and 41% respectively while “whom” has fallen by just over half.
Formal terms such as
Mr and Mrs are down 35% and 57% respectively.
There has been a “significant” increase in exclamation marks which experts say is due to them being “overused”.
Words related to technology such as “vlog, fitbit and bitcoin” have also emerged.
Shorthands including “omg” (oh my God), “tbh” (to be honest) and “defo” (definitely) are now common place.
The word “amazing” soared from 16.6 times per million to 88.6, while “maybe” leapt from 89.3 to 236.1.