No apostrophe ...catastrophe!

WRITTEN English is becoming a dog’s dinner as social media kills off the apostrophe.

Twitter users drop punctuation marks to save characters in posts and to make texting quicker.

Why type “you’re” when “your” will do? Who cares if it’s wrong to write “its”? And does anyone really care about the possessive principles governing Fido’s evening meal?

I do. Aberrant apostrophes drive me potty and the absence of them is just as irritating.

But language changes with the times.

Researchers have been looking at the way British

English has evolved since the spread of technology in the 1990s.

And they say “progressive spelling” like “gonna”, the widespread use of abbreviations such as OMG and the dearth of punctuation marks all make written language more dynamic.

So apostrophes will soon vanish forever and nobody will worry.

Not even when I explain that the contents of the bin liners in the attic were my lovers.