Newsman battled apostrophe ‘barbarism’
Possessed by possessives, he founded society
John Richards, a British newspaperman who attracted a flurry of international attention when he founded the Apostrophe Protection Society, a self-styled bulwark against the “barbarians” laying waste to a humble yet essential element of the English language, died March 30 at a hospital in Boston, a town in Lincolnshire, England. He was 97.
The cause was sepsis, said his son, Stephen Richards.
In the universe of grammatical gadflies, Richards represented a particularly committed species. A retired journalist, he spent 35 years working for regional newspapers in England, mainly as a reporter. But he also did a stint as a copy editor, purging copy of misspellings, grammatical slip-ups and errors of usage.
By the end of his career, Richards was “fed up with correcting reporters’ copy” and told the Wall Street Journal that he “decided to do something” about a common and especially vexing category of error.
In 2001, he founded the Apostrophe Protection Society. The name of his association reflected his view of the tiny punctuation mark as a “poor defenceless creature,” its very existence in danger as technology increasingly encouraged speed over grammatical precision.
At first, the society’s ranks consisted of Richards and his son. But when the Daily Telegraph published an article about their quest, Richards said he received 500 letters from around the world.
Mr. Richards and his most enthusiastic comrades set about collecting photographic evidence, which they posted on their website, of the extent of modern apostrophe abuse: a line declaring that “Diamond’s Are Forever,” a handwritten store sign advertising “LOT’S MORE TOY’S INSIDE” and a newsstand where readers could find “NEW’S AND MAGAZINES.”
More irritating to Richards was its omission. He was particularly dismayed when several English towns eliminated apostrophes from the official names of landmarks, producing such abominations as “St. Pauls Square.”
In 2019, Richards announced the shuttering of the Apostrophe Protection Society — “with regret.”