Make Apostrophe’s Great Again!

We've spent the last many years being told that we can't believe our eyes or our ears, that we must be very careful how we speak and what we say, so as not to offend. That men can be women, that women can be men, that unwelcome words are literal violence, and that singular hes and shes--if any of them chooses so to be--must be referred to by made-up words such as "ze" or "zir," or even by the plural pronoun "they." This calculated and deliberate incoherence makes it virtually impossible for even--or perhaps especially--native speakers of English to discern anything useful about a person who's under discussion by--for example--a police chief who is asking the public for information on a "person of interest" in the commission of a crime, but who really can't say much, if anything, to narrow down the potential pool of suspects, or tell people what sorts of things to look for (race, sex, size, etc.) for fear of stepping on a woke landmine. And it explains much of the rhetorical calisthenics regularly on display when it comes to things like defining the term "woman;" whether biological men can be woman enough to hang out in girls' locker rooms; and whether or not men who've been convicted of crimes of violence against women (and others too for that matter) should be housed in women's prisons, even if the epiphany as to their "real" gender only occurred until after their conviction. (I don't know how prevalent this last sort of thing is in the United States; it seems to be fairly common in the UK.)

The arc of the linguistic universe, when it comes to English, seems to be bending to the illiterate, the moronic, and the increasingly vague.

Even above and beyond that, I think it's bending to the damaging.

I think that--actually--the most important thing we've learned is that the basic sender <--> receiver communication paradigm, in which both ends of the process were valued equally, in which both agreed on an established underlying set of protocols which generally led to understanding, and in which both parties learned to take into account helpful signals such as tone and context, and learned to subtract bothersome signals such as noise, have been upended.

Yesterday, all that mattered was what the "receiver" thought of the communication. The intent of the "sender," no matter how pure, whether excellently or clumsily expressed, mattered not, and was often under deep suspicion from the get-go... especially if the sender was of a particular race, class, religion, or if he or she belonged to some other "oppressor" group. (Look no further than that chart, a couple of years ago, from the Smithsonian about how characteristics such as precision, hard work, planning for the future, etc. were "White" characteristics, whose value (in what appeared to me to be a very racist proposition) the Smithsonian appeared to think that--no matter how useful they may have been when it came to societal advancement--those who were not "White" could not possibly comprehend or accomplish.

But, never mind! It's all different now! It's not that we can't believe our eyes and ears anymore (because we still can't). But, phooey on the "receiver!" Now, it's all about what the "sender" meant!

Yesterday, in one of his signature "step on her moment" moves, when it comes to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Joe--in a Zoom call with a Latino outreach outfit--said the following:

I heard what I heard. Sure sounds like Joe is demeaning Trump supporters as "garbage." And that's how Trump, and most senior Republicans, and many--many--ordinary people took it. Trust me: I was in a Walmart parking lot a couple of hours ago, and I've never heard anything like it.

Given the rules of engagement of the last couple of decades, I think the "receivers" get to define the message and shout their offense. It's not even particularly surprising, given Biden's previous comments on the "MAGA crowd," his blood-red "soul of a nation" speech, and his and Kamala's history of associating Trump and his followers with the worst of humanity; not to mention Obama's "bitter clingers" remarks, and Hillary's "deplorables" comments. Here's a walk down memory lane when it comes to the latter:

You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.

So it's not super-hard to move from those words (in 2016, a couple of months before that year's election), in which Hillary explicitly consigned 25% of the US population into the garbage pile, to Biden's copycat words in 2024 when he's done nothing but (literally) double down on half the country.

Ugh.

I'm amused to watch the damage control. Most of it, hilariously, seems to center on the apostrophe, a punctuation mark whose correct use, I'm pretty sure, is unknown to most folks born after about 1980. (I haven't done all the scientific research, but--to quote Kamala Harris--"I have studied the maps." Which, in this case, constitute an awful lot of written material, most of it not even online.)

Earth to Millennials and following: The thing about apostrophes is that you can't actually "see" them in spoken words. So when someone called "Franklin Leonard," on CNN makes excuses for Biden's stutter and says that--as a fellow former stutterer himself--"It's very obvious to me that there's an apostrophe at the end of "supporters" there," I am very quick to cry "foul."

No Franklin. I don't care how good you are. You can't "see" an apostrophe in the spoken word.

Of course, the media is doing its bit, when it comes to butt-covering. Other iterations of the video posted above include some variant of closed-captioning, which is impossible to remove and include (under what authority I'm not sure) the supposedly damaging apostrophe in the text. (I think that might be more effective if I actually believed that most people viewing it were sensitive to the "singular possessive" meaning of the same. I actually suspect it's lost on most of them. LOL.)

Some "round-tables" start snappishly with the assertion that "Joe Biden isn't running for President." It's as if he were a nonentity rather than the Sitting President of the United States. Or as if he's irrelevant and shoved to the sidelines because he's no longer in the game. (I can't help including this comment from a Biden official (speaking off the record) WRT Biden's recent remark that "we gotta lock [Trump] up":

For better or worse, no one is listening to him anymore and his words have little power and less reach. It’s a blip. Gone in any meaningful way by mid-day tomorrow.

Glory be. Ayatollah Mohammed Whatsit Mohammed, call your office. Apparently there's a vacancy at the top.

But here's the relevant question for this most recent matter and the subject of this post: Was Joe Biden reading from the teleprompter? If he was--and if the person who wrote his remarks as they should have been delivered wasn't an utter cretin, then Biden's remarks went horribly wrong, and perhaps he shouldn't be POTUS anymore. If he wasn't reading from the teleprompter, and he was speaking for himself, then what he said is unforgivable, and he shouldn't be POTUS anymore.

Either way, he loses. Not because he offended the people who received his message. But because he's spent a lifetime honing that rotten and nasty message, and--irrespective of his attempts to wriggle out of accountability for it, it's actually time for him to pay.

PS: Pedant Alert: There's a grammatical solecism in the title of this post. No need to bring it to my attention: I already know. Just cast a wry smile and move on.