Do misused apostrophes get your heart racing? Last October, linguists at the University of Birmingham “discovered” that poor grammar induces physical stress. (They could have just asked me.) Their revelatory study concerned 41 unsuspecting adults who were exposed to linguistic snafus, both written and spoken. Grammatical gaffes didn’t just make the participants mentally cringe; they sparked a significant reduction in heart-rate variability: The autonomic nervous system had become stressed. Why? It seems that the cognitive effort of processing language lapses takes a toll on our physiological systems. So when your pulse quickens upon reading poorly punctuated text, take solace in knowing that it’s not just your cultivated snobbery; it’s an involuntary physiological reaction. Underscoring the complex dynamics between cognition and physiology, this study suggests that something as seemingly cerebral as language-processing might affect your physical health.

But wait. That may be only because you’ve been miseducated to react that way. Just recently, the public intellectual and linguist John McWhorter argued in the New York Times (May 27, 2024, at p. A19) that “apostrophes in general don’t make our language much clearer,” adding: “We could really do without most of them.”

The title of his op-ed? Brace yourself: “Lets Chill Out about Apostrophes.”

The distinction between it’s and its, as well as between you’re and your, “is just . . . decorative,” McWhorter says. “Blackboard grammar rules provide one of the last permissible ways to look down on others.”

It’s (ahem) an interesting argument that harks back to the days of a preliterate society. In Chaucer’s day, after all, “apostrophe-free English could be perfectly comprehensible and eminently legitimate.” Linguistic conventions were in great flux. People got along just fine in the Middle Ages — without apostrophes. By the 19th century, though, it was well settled that apostrophes were to be used (1) to indicate the possessive case (Angelou’s book), (2) to show the omission of one or more letters (didn’t, o’er), and, very occasionally, (3) to show certain plurals of letters (the professor awarded three A’s). The singular vs. the plural possessive has long proved pesky for the average person (Paul Stevens’s house, the Stevenses’ house).

Literary usage might be too cognitively demanding.

McWhorter’s argument is in keeping with other positions he has taken over the years. Last July in the Times, he argued that it isn’t really necessary for American students to learn foreign languages. After all, fewer and fewer do learn them, and artificial intelligence is taking up the slack. McWhorter concluded: “Technology is eliminating most of the need to learn foreign languages for more utilitarian purposes.”

But he isn’t arguing that we might rely on artificial intelligence to punctuate appropriately. He’s saying we might do away with apostrophes altogether. That’s just for starters. In McWhorter’s view, linguistic “errors” aren’t really errors at all. In his book The Word on the Street (1998), he posits that teaching rules about “good English” involves “counterintuitive, party-pooping bizarrerie” and is a “persistent little scourge that seems to have gotten hold of the Anglophone world.”

Similarly, in his 2008 book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, he argues that solecisms don’t really exist: They’re just “new ways of putting things.” Hence: “The conception that new ways of putting things are mistakes is just an illusion.” One example he cites is Billy and me as a subject, as in “Billy and me are going to the store.”

“In our time,” McWhorter writes, “pedants are engaged in a quest to keep English’s pronouns in their cages instead of me being used as a subject after and.” One supposes that he would say the same about I being used as an object after and, as in “Please come see my wife and I.” On this view, pronouns are fungible as long as they follow the word and: It matters not whether they function as subjects or as objects.

How’s your blood pressure? If it’s climbing, perhaps you’ve been taught wrong. The correct thing to be taught, according to McWhorter, is that “one must revel in disorder.”

The age-old dogma among many linguists is that native speakers of a language don’t make mistakes. Or, in McWhorter’s words, “the notion that people are always ‘slipping up’ in their native English is a fiction.” The dogma isn’t new. As long ago as 1963, the linguist Mario Pei bemoaned the idea that “the native speaker can do no wrong.”

The drumbeat has been going on for many decades. Grammatical instruction has gradually fallen out of curricula, and we’re seeing the results: If the populace as a whole ever knew the difference between they’re, their, and there, that day has passed. A majority seem not to know and not to care. We know this only because social media have exposed how ordinary people write both casually and formally.

We shouldn’t take it for granted (or is that take it for granite, as many people write?) that these things really matter. One might argue that there are other things to be learned in our schools. Why drill kids on your/you’re, they’re/their/there, it’s/its, and so on? Why not teach computer graphics instead, or coding? There are so many other things to learn than Standard Written English, and they’re so much more fun!

A not so amusing aspect of this argument is that, over the past several generations, many teachers of English were lured by the siren song. The ones who were swooped into the maelstrom helped extinguish their line of work. English majors are sharply down everywhere. There’s an identity crisis: What is English as a discipline? Many people see little practical utility in it: As commonly practiced today, higher-ed English studies almost exclusively involve reading multicultural “social justice” literature rather than learning to write well. If that’s the endeavor, it becomes hard to justify graduates’ huge debt loads with a paucity of practical skills to accompany the baccalaureate degree. (Just think of theyre debt!)

An unfair characterization, you say? Perhaps, but only in the sense that every generalization is somewhat inaccurate. I was an English major myself in the late 1970s, when the trend was beginning. I saw it up close, and I’ve kept tabs ever since.

Now we have McWhorter, a linguistics professor, arguing (2008) that “in an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me [as subject], singular they, and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.” It’s hard to fathom what could be meant here by “graceful oral and written expression.”

No wonder people are confused. Even professors. What are they to profess?

McWhorter’s most recent provocation is to say that we could stop using apostrophes altogether “with no harm to anyone.” No harm? What about the studies showing that poor punctuation, like any other linguistic mistake, induces physical distress? Perhaps those of us who feel that way need to be reeducated to revel in disorder.