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The end of civilisation as we know it. John Richards, founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, has conceded defeat. Grammar is dead. When I was an agony aunt I received a letter from St Paul’s Girls’ School. You know where to apostrophise? I asked my editor. (I’d just been told our new address, St Dionis’ Vicarage, Parson’s Green, had none.) I was at St Paul’s myself! she said. Years later, our youngest daughter’s girls’ school launched its logo… with no apostrophe. Unlike St Paul’s, it perhaps didn’t trust its parents to get it right. In a sense, such attention to detail couldn’t matter less. The abbreviation of text-speak – you and two; four and -ate – displays creative innovation. Grammar cannot die: not while humans talk. Jesus criticised the Pharisees for obsessive attention to the minutiae of law. And yet, Jesus said, every last iota and dot – tiniest vowel and full-stop – will last as long as heaven and earth. Curious, as the Hebrew Scriptures initially had neither: only consonants, aides memoires to aural tradition; the pointing added later to clarify pronunciation. After all, writing, like grammar, was originally descriptive: musical notes on a stave. New Testament Greek was similar. Paradoxically, detail also couldn’t matter more. For centuries, editors have bowdlerised Shakespeare’s spelling and punctuation, destroying actors’ precious clues. We need the First Folio, published in 1623, to know that when Lady Macbeth gilds the faces of murdered Duncan’s grooms with blood to suggest their guilt, the spellings mimic each other in a deliberate pun: emphasis lost without Shakespeare’s creative and particular spelling. Let’s eat Granny does need punctuation. As does: I’m sorry I love you. Or, I’d like to thank my parents, Suzie and God. When meaning is confused, dots and dashes become critical clarification, not pointless pedantry. I love cooking my girlfriend and my dog. In this season of Advent, Christians await God’s communication. How can the ineffable Divinity become comprehensible to humankind? Beyond time and space – let alone sentence or phrase or pen-stroke – God becomes what theologians call the Scandal of Historical Particularity: that baby in that time and that place. The vast underlying meaning of the universe expressed in the tiniest fingernail. The Word of Incarnation: the language of love. And the apostrophe? Bristol boasts a vigilante who prowls the streets with anti-graffiti, blanking-out misplaced apostrophes. Like jots and tittles, what could matter less? But, “It’s more of a crime,” he says, “to have apostrophes in the wrong place.” Indeed. What could matter more?