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Australian English: The language of a new society edited by Peter Collins And David Blair

by
June 1989, no. 111

Australian English: The language of a new society edited by Peter Collins And David Blair

University of Queensland Press, 358 pp, $39.95 pb, 0-7022-2110-4

Australian English: The language of a new society edited by Peter Collins And David Blair

by
June 1989, no. 111

Language like the weather, is something that everybody wants to talk about, itemise or complain about. All of us have our views about this or that departure from a supposed norm, this or that barbarous neologisms, this quaint local usage, that oddity of pronunciation. Many of us, too, can be as cranky about language as we are about our interpretations of the weather. For myself, I should like to see the apostrophe abolished, as being something which causes much confusion and error while doing virtually no good; but I am sufficiently conventional to use it, after all. In the upshot it’s not worth a cracker kicking against all the pricks. Let the apostrophe live out its natural life.

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