According to this article in the New Zealand Herald, a professor at Monash University wants to abolish the possessive apostrophe:
In a counter-argument to [Lynne] Truss’s book [Eats, Shoots and Leaves] - which sets out to preserve traditional conventions of grammar and punctuation - Kate Burridge, a linguistics professor at Australia’s Monash University, calls for the apostrophe to be dropped.
“When I suggested on radio that the possessive apostrophe should be dropped … because people get it wrong so often, you would have thought a public flogging would not have been a severe enough punishment,” she says.
Burridge seems to be a maven in support of “bad language,” as the NZH headline rather dumbly puts it - in addition to the apostrophe mission, she wants to get rid of euphemisms and valorize cant. The article is unclear as to when exactly Burridge called for getting rid of the apostrophe, but this blog entry at Catallaxy and this article in The Age would indicate that it was in her book Blooming English, which came out in 2002.
It doesn’t seem like we should make conscious efforts to change apostrophes or anything related to punctuation, really - that’s a bit like the arguments for using invented neuter pronouns, which just doesn’t take off because it doesn’t feel natural (and combating sexism in language, from my view, is a worthy cause, whereas getting rid of apostrophes doesn’t seem to have much social value). Can’t we just kind of stop worrying about punctuation being “right”?
Enter electronically mediated text communication. I’m particularly fond of the apostrophe example, as regular readers will notice, but using CMC voids many expectations for standard punctuation usage all around. The lack of punctuation in general, and more specifically the attitude that doesn’t care about the lack of punctuation, indicate - whether people agree with this or not - that some things in written language are superfluous. People are communicating here, just fine thank you, with or without certain punctuation marks. That’s why CMC is so interesting: after the rules are relaxed, we get to use just what we need, and create what we don’t have, to get our messages across clearly, effectively, and affectively.
[ADDENDUM: Today I saw a sub-head in the Washington Post that says
Public Broadcasting Fight's Partisan Divide
Now, I thought this was a misplaced apostrophe at first, thinking that public broadcasting is fighting against a partisan divide. Really, there is a partisan divide that belongs to public broadcasting. So in this instance, i have to say: Thanks, Apostrophe.]