The obvious one is using “&” (ampersand) to represent and. This is its intended function, since it originated as a ligature of “et”, the Latin word for and. Its name is a corruption of “and, per se and“, meaning “and, representing the word and itself”.

The most common, tho, is using an apostrophe to represent a dropped letter or two in contractions such as don’t or I’ll.

Another, largely fallen out of use, is “o’ ” to represent “of the”, now used mainly in “3 o’clock” type constructions.

And another, used fairly frequently, is “w/” to represent “with”. The slash as a means of abbreviation is traditionally used in a few other places, but they tend to be very specific and therefore not very useful (“G/L” for “general ledger” comes to mind).

Using a period to abbreviate words is the most natural way to make general abbreviations, and probably the oldest. So extending this seems the most logical idea.

Here is one proposal:

• “.” represents “the”
• “o.” represents “of” or “of the”
• “&.” represents “and the”
• “f.” represents “from” or “from the”
• “i.” represents “in” or “in the”
• “t.” represents “to” or “to the”
• “a.” represents “at” or “at the”
• “v.” represents “versus” or “versus the”
• “w.” represents “with” or “with the”

When followed by “a” or “an”, add an “a” after the period. (“f.a” = “from an”)

These would really only be used in places where space is at a premium, such as on marquees, newspaper headlines, and such.

Therefore:

• Harry Potter &. Order o. Phoenix
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• .
• .Lord o. Rings: .Fellowship o. Ring
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
• .
• Escape f. Planet o. Apes
• Escape from the Planet of the Apes
• .
• He-Man &. Masters o. Universe
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
• .
• .Hitchhiker’s Guide t. Galaxy
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• .
• Indiana Jones &. Kingdom o. Crystal Skull
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• .
• Master & Commander: .Far Side o. World
• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
• .
• Mega Shark v. Giant Octopus
• Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus
• .
• Pirates o. Caribbean: .Curse o. Black Pearl
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
• .
• Devil w.a Blue Dress On
• Devil with a Blue Dress On
• .
• .Man w. Golden Gun
• The Man with the Golden Gun
• .
• Memoirs o.a Invisible Man
• Memoirs of an Invisible Man

It would be great to have the mid-dot handy to use instead of the period. The mid-dot is an existing character that is a single dot positioned a little lower than the top dot on a colon (·:). If this were accessible on the keyboard, it could be used for any abbreviation that formerly used a period, thereby clarifying the fact that it is merely the end of the word, and not the end of the sentence.

• ·Lord o· Rings: ·Fellowship o· Ring
• Pirates o· Caribbean: ·Curse o· Black Pearl
• Indiana Jones &· Kingdom o· Crystal Skull
• Mega Shark v· Giant Octopus
• Memoirs o·a Invisible Man
• Mosquito Man (a·k·a· Mansquito)
• 3 o·clock
• will o· wisp

You might ask, why bother with the period or mid-dot at all? The answer is that we want to make it clear that something is being left out. The mid-dot would be so useful for this, it should be used in place of the apostrophe for contractions. This would clean up quotations, which often are made awkward with an apostrophe in the middle (which is why I suggested the period instead of the apostrophe in the first place).

• can·t
• don·t
• I·ll
• She·ll
• would·ve
• hadn·t
• “You said, ‘I won·t’, didn·t you?”
• She had a list of “do”s and “don·t”s

If this were adopted, then the whole scheme becomes simple: replace the apostrophe with the mid-dot on the keyboard. Typing remains simple for contractions, and single quotes can be dealt with the way they always should have been: by having open and close single- and double-quote keys available in place of, for example, the square and curly brackets.

Even better, with the mid-dot we could signify the removal of whole words and phrases more clearly. Instead of using ellipses of three periods (…), we would make them three mid-dots (···). (These are, in fact, used in mathematics.) Then periods could remain clearly the representation of pauses and words just trailing off, rather than words being left out.

• “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation···.”
• “The fall of the Roman Empire was precipitated by ··· a breakdown in social cohesiveness… and Huns.”
• “And you·re going…?” “I·m going to the ··· club,” he snarled, “where I can get some ··· peace and quiet.”

I would say that “ellipsis” (·) and “ellipses” (···) would be the name for the mid-dot used this way. (Ellipsis means “ommision”.) And “trail” or perhaps “anatases” (Greek for “stretching”) would be the term for three periods (…) symbolizing speech that trails off.

So I’ll keep this blog all about English spelling and punctuation but I’ll use only the Thru with “Through” rules.

A hundred years from now, English is likely to be even more dominant across the globe, with nearly everyone—especially white collar workers—being schooled in it as a first or second language. With English more and more of a world language, and with no central authority like the Academie Francaise, these lerners are likely to make changes to the language–perhaps without even realizing it–to make it more consistent and logical.

Even with the spelling changes, spellcheck software will still be ubiquitous. A worldwide culture of texting will reduce the literacy rate to virtually zero. As a related side effect, cursive writing will surely become a lost art, as children go directly from printing to typing. Signatures, made mostly obsolete by electronic fingerprints and other technology for confirming identity, will become artful combinations of initials and fanciful wavy lines without inherent meaning.

These trends suggest that modest spelling reform is inevitable, particularly of the type that brings US and British English closer together. As Americans and Britons read more material written by non-US writers, the more they will come to accept the slite changes in spelling and punctuation. As always, this will be more true of young people than older people, and the usual generational rift of slang with include more unusual spellings. Young people play with language very casually, for example rite now using U for you, r for are, and so on. And just as slang becomes legitimized as its users get older*, so will these spellings.

* At one time say (as in “O say, can you see…?”) was considered hily informal slang, as were okay, contact as a verb, copacetic, gay, and cool.

So says the front page blerb for this episode of the Down in Front movie podcast. I just wanted to note as a werd nerd that the traditionally correct form is “Terminator and we are DONE professionally”, but the reason this sounds wierd is peculiar.

We almost never use we in an “and” construction because English can’t distinguish between times when “we” includes the other thing we’re talking about and when it doesn’t. And in any “and” construction, it’s natural to assume that it should be inclusive, because why else would you include them in the same construction? I don’t remember if the original construction they are parodying* was “We are done professionally” or “You and I are done professionally” but you can see how that we is inclusive and the way the “you and I” is synonymous with “we” in that sense.

But DIF’s parody uses us/we in the exclusive sense. That is, it excludes “Terminator” from the “us/we” group (the DIF crew). But and naturally forms groups that get referred to as we. It’s grammatically confusing because English literally doesn’t have werds to express that thaut.

Insted, we would normally frase that sentiment as “Terminator and DIF are DONE professionally” or “We are DONE professionally with Terminator”.

By the way, it’s a nice parody and a pun at the same time. DIF is done doing commentaries for all the Terminator movies and satirically “DONE” werking with the Terminator franchise out of frustration with its behavior.

* A leaked recording of Christian Bale’s on-set rant directed at a crew member during filming of Terminator Salvation.

* Based on errors like these, some spelling reformers suggest that we shouldnt bother with the apostrophe ennymore at all, since it clearly isnt doing its job very well. If people cant remember where and when to use it, they obviously arent going to miss it. The primary problem is that its normally used to form possessives—except in pronouns—but its also used to indicate contractions—especially in pronouns—so the its/it’s is very confusing. Im agenst getting rid of the apostrophe, but modifying the rules for its use would be helpful. Perhaps reducing it to only indicating contractions would be the best option. That would eliminate the problem that even seasoned writers have with frases like girls softball and ladies room.

* (Demonstrating the elimination of apostrophes.)

Of course, then possessives would look just like plurals, which could cause confusion of its own.

I went to Marvins party and talked to some of the guys. The guys said the girls frend wasnt coming.

Traditional spelling often maintains the connection to a fault. A derivation may vary wildly in pronunciation from the root werd, but the derivation looks as if it does not.

break > breakfast (/braik/ > /brek f.st/ not /braik fast/)

law > lawyer (/law/ > /loy yer/ not /law yer/)

envelope > envelope

climate > acclimate > acclimatize

you > your

do > don’t

These werds create problems for spelling reform advocates because respelling the derivation werd changes it enough to braik the connection to the root, which distresses curmudgeons.

However traditional spelling also often fails to maintain a visual connection, and most people take no notice. In fact, it feels perfectly natural.

destroy > destruction (compare construct > construction)

submerge > submersible

choose > chose

lose > lost

solve > solution (Latin did not discern U from V)

deceive > deceit > deception (compare receipt)

proceed > procession

adhere > adhesion

decide > decision

maintain > maintenance

will > won’t

• Leaving out certen grammar werds (especially the, a, and that) is allowed.
• Many English werds can be both nouns and verbs.
• Both third person present verbs and plural nouns generally end in S.

Take this one from CNN.com:

Georgia city hopes order prevails in housing sign-up [link]

In ordinary conversation, the werd hopes is a plural noun at least as often as it is a third person present verb. And the werd order is a verb nearly as often as it is a noun. And the word prevails also is a verb, but not in the way you might expect. So it’s easy to get lost looking for the verb in that sentence. As a result, you’re left wondering about the hopes of a Georgia city and what those hopes are doing ordering someone around and what kind of things prevails are. In conversation, you would probably frase it as hopes that, immediately clarifying things.

I wonder sometimes if this couldn’t be fixed economically with punctuation taking the place of the grammar werds. We do it with the werd and when we replace it with the single character &. The name for this is “ampersand”, which is a corruption of the frase “and per se and”, meaning “and, as itself”.

Perhaps we could use some of the disused characters still commonly found on English keyboards to substitute for other grammar werds. The pipe (|), for instance, could sub for that. So,

Georgia city hopes | order prevails in housing sign-up

That’s actually rather satisfying because the werd that generally serves to separate clauses anyway, which is what it’s doing here. “Georgia city hopes” is a simple sentence that is vaguely yerning for a dependent clause to use as an object of the hope. And “that order prevails” is another simple sentence that is dependent on the previous part for its context.

Strangely, newspaper editors, as keen as they are to minimize copy, only rarely use the ampersand. Instead, they prefer a comma.

• sing, sang, sung
• ring, rang, rung
• drink, drank, drunk
• stink, stank, stunk
• shrink, shrank, shrunk
• sink, sank, sunk
• ride, rode, ridden
• write, wrote, written
• hide, hid, hidden
• strike, struck, stricken
• choose, chose, chosen
  

This has remained almost only in verbs where the primary vowel is I (iether /i/ or /iy/, since they wer all pronounced /i/ at one time). But there are elements of this remaining in other kinds of verbs, such as become/became/become and is/was. And many teachers have faut their students’ urges to say bring/brang/have brung.

Yet it has become very common—and apparently quite accepted—to use sunk and shrunk in place of sank and shrank, even tho the only word commonly accepted as taking this form properly is slink/slunk/slunk (the old form slank is archaic now and entirely nonstandard). A major feature film was called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

And the frase “You sunk my battleship” gets more hits on Google than “You sank my battleship,” even tho the werding appears in the famous television commercial in the traditional form.

In the Simpsons, Jasper jokes that Lisa “sunk my battleship.”

In a famous scene from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, Deth seems to say “You have sank my battleship” but this is probably a side affect of his accent on the werds “You have sunk my battleship.”

Plus, there are a couple of terrible songs called “You Sunk My Battleship”.

They spent just a week traveling and encountered fewer than 500 errors, correcting a mere 236. You could find 500 spelling and punctuation errors reading a single hi school class’s term papers. But the authors have a larger cause. Deck suggests that the apostrophe, a major cause of confusion in their experience, should be abolished.

Eliminating the apostrophe isn’t in my list of 7 simple rules to improve English spelling, but maybe it should be. It doesn’t really do much for us, after all, and what it does is confusing: indicating the omission of letters in a contraction (do not > don’t, 1960s > ’60s) and indicating possession (Carl’s). But it’s not used to indicate possession in pronouns (its). But it is traditionally used to indicate plurals for very short items (5′s, A’s, ?’s); this is now frowned upon, but not everyone has gotten the memo. Plus, it gets in the way when using quotation marks, since it is the same as a single quote mark.

He said, “I didn’t say, ‘Diane’s losin’.'”