Sir – I should thank Nicholas Lawrence for inspiring me to study the history of the apostrophe. He is correct that writers of about 200 years ago or more, such as Jane Austen and the others he quotes, would have used apostrophes differently from today, since the current rules were not agreed by consensus until the mid-19th century.

But no doubt those writers would have appreciated some rules, in order to know whether their grammar was correct. The reason they preferred to use them, even without set rules, was for the clarification of their sentences and that purpose is just as true today as then, as Tony Augarde has already elucidated.

Nicholas’s point about their disuse in mobile text messages and the like, however, has no relevance to the English language itself. I myself often use “c u l8r” and such phrases in texts and may replace apostrophe “s” with “z” but I am not using English, merely communicating information as quickly and using as few keystrokes, as possible. Would he also suggest, as would be consistent, that we start spelling “see” with one letter in treatises and novels?

The English language is capable of expressing the most subtle and profound concepts of science and philosophy. No one would attempt to do this through the language of text messages. Finally, to suggest that retaining an apostrophe is “dumbing down”, because the meaning is obvious without it, is like Einstein stating his famous equation as E=mc – the “squared” was obvious so he missed it out! Omitting the fine detail of any language is real “dumbing down”, leading to the ultimate degeneration of the language itself.

Ken Weavers, Headington