Actually, I?m something of a pedant and I quite like many of the quirks of the English language (although I prefer US spellings such as anemia, hemorrhage, fetal to their UK equivalents).
But when it comes to apostrophes, one could make out a good case for their abolition.
Consider, for example, ?The boys were playing football? ; it?s quite obvious that ?boys? here is plural, so no problem. But in the phrase ?the girls ball? it?s equally obvious that ?girls? is possessive, although there is, of course, a potential problem as to whether it means girl?s or girls?; I suspect that in most cases, the context would make it clear. When speaking, does one say ?The girl apostrophe s ball?; I think not, yet the meaning is probably clear. Similarly in ?Petes ball? it is pretty obvious that Petes is possessive. Do we really need apostrophes to indicate possession? Perhaps not.
Consider, then, words like aren?t, can?t, isn?t?, don?t; there arent (!) (to the best of my knowledge) English words arent, dont or isnt, though there are, of course, cant and wont. So why is the apostrophe needed? I imagine that in any situation where ?cant? is meant, it would be pretty obvious that it means ?tilt? or ?politician speak?, and not ?cannot?, while it's pretty obvious what 'I had a glass of red with my tea, as is my wont' means.
Again, I would guess that for the most part the context would make quite clear that ?its? means ?of it? or ?it is? ? with or without an apostrophe (even a wrongly used one ? how often have you come across ?it?s? used as the possessive of it?).
So ? Im not actually advocating that we do away with apostrophes, just posing the question, and being a bit of an iconoclast. I daresay that if we did away with them, wed soon get used to it. (I mean, wed in the previous sentence obviously means ?we would? rather than 'someones nuptials'.)
After all, for example, weve got used to 'hopefully' meaning 'I hope that' as opposed to its earlier meaning 'full of hope'.
Mind you, I dont like the way 'literally' is going; so often these days people just stick in 'literally' for no obvious reason ? no reason at all, really. Once upon a time 'literally' meant just that ? that was exactly how something happened. Nowadays, you're likely to hear, say, 'It was literally raining cats and dogs'. Oh yeah? There really were Pekes, Poodles, Persians and Pekinese pouring out of the sky? Well, I suppose Hurricane Henrietta couldve (clever, huh) lifted the roof off of the Battersea Cats and Dogs Home, sucked all the poor critters up into the sky, and literally rained them all down on King's Cross or some other goddam place in London . . . . . . but I don't think it's very likely.