Call it frustration, anger or plain annoyance, John Richards, a leading recorder of blatant abuse of the apostrophe, has decided to give up his role as a watchdog of the widely used punctuation mark.
"With regret, I have to announce that after some 18 years, I have decided to close the Apostrophe Protection Society. We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won," 96-year-old Richards announced on his website which he ran for 18 long years.
Richards, who worked as a reporter and spent the last quarter of his career as a sub-editor, started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 "with the specific aim of preserving the correct use of this currently much-abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language."
However, he had two reasons to shut shop. "One is that at 96, I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English language," Richards wrote on the society website.
According to the website, since the announcement, the site has had a 600-fold increase in traffic, which is an expensive affair. "So we have decided to close it until the New Year. When it returns, Webmaster John Hale intends to keep the site running for a few more years."
The mark we call an apostrophe probably originated in 1509, in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, at the hands of the French printer Geoffroy Tory, says Merriam Webster.
Long before the advent of the internet and the 'social media pressure' to sound cool, the correct use of the apostrophe has been a subject of discussion among scholars, literary groups, editors and students.
The disbanding might come as a shock for grammar geeks and pedants worldwide, but it must serve as a reminder to those who refuse to differentiate between its and it's. It's no rocket science really.