When he saw errant apostrophes on a memorial to Australian soldiers which had been erected by the Australian Government on a battlefield in France, the writer, Frank Moorhouse rang the Prime Minister's office to complain, at once, from a phone booth somewhere in Picardy. It was an exemplary thing to do, if only to protect the French from our plague. Possessive apostrophes have run wild like rabbits, and only a lunatic would suggest that we should do nothing to halt their progress. But eternal vigilance and endless complaints will not make them go away. The pragmatic solution, the smart thing, is to abolish them altogether.
Sadness is better than chaos.
While we're at it, we might give up any suggestion that language is, or ought to be, governed by immutable rules or that it should be immune to transmogrification. Better to adopt a welcoming demeanour when common speech approaches, even when it becomes distorted and ugly, or like messages on a short wave radio out of the Deputy Prime Minister's mouth. Rex Hunt, on balance, is probably good for the language. We'll have to suffer worse indignities if we're to get at the dry rot at the centre. I mean the sludge, the partially fossilised material with which the public discourse is infarcted, the stuff we get on official forms and documents - the stuff that comes out of the Public Service and the corporations and their CEOs, the stuff that comes down the line when we ring Diners' Club or the water company and which is usually followed by Chopin.