16 January | Thoughts
Waterstones found guilty of apostrophe murder
Waterstone’s (or Waterstones) has dropped its apostrophe to make it more compatible with the online world, prompting outrage from twittering apostrophe-lovers – and apathy from everyone else.
“It’s just plain wrong,” said an angry John Richards, chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society. “A bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English.”
He is not alone. On Twitter, one user believes that the apostrophe was dropped “to facilitate morons”, whilst another user labelled ‘highly influential’ describes it as “one more reason not to shop in Waterstone(‘)s.” Others are righteously calling out to “protect our language from decay.”
But Waterstones aren’t the first to face the apostrophe dilemma. While Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s have both retained theirs, Clarks, Currys, Harrods and Selfridges have all said goodbye to pesky punctuation.
James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, defends the decision as one of common sense and practicality: “Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling.” He has a point.
Tim Waterstone, the founder of Waterstones, has had nothing to do with the company since 1993. But while some believe that the removal of the comma is insulting to the founder, Daunt insists that the change “reflects an altogether truer picture of our business today which, while created by one, is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers.”
So does it really matter that Waterstones has dropped its apostrophe? Are its customers going to stop buying books there as a result? Our guess: probably not.