John Richards, a British newspaperman who attracted a flurry of international attention when he founded and later resignedly disbanded the Apostrophe Protection Society, a self-styled bulwark against the "barbarians" laying waste to a humble yet essential element of the English language, died March 30 at a hospital in Boston, a town in Lincolnshire, England. He was 97.
The cause was sepsis, said his son, Stephen Richards. Richards's death - even some copy editors might disagree on the preferred possessive form of his surname, whether "Richards's" or "Richards' " - was previously reported in publications including the Boston Standard and the Lincolnite of Lincolnshire.
In the universe of grammatical gadflies - a mantle many of them wear proudly - Richards represented a particularly committed species. A retired journalist, he spent 35 years working for regional newspapers in England, mainly as a reporter. But he also did a stint as a copy editor, purging copy of misspellings, grammatical slip-ups and errors of usage.
Even the most charitable editor can change "flaunt" to "flout" and "pour over" to "pore over" only so many times before exasperation sets in. By the end of his career, Richards was "fed up with correcting reporters' copy" and told the Wall Street Journal that he "decided to do something" about a common and especially vexing category of error.
In 2001, he founded the Apostrophe Protection Society. The name of his association reflected his view of the tiny punctuation mark as a "poor defenseless creature," its very existence in danger as technology increasingly encouraged speed over grammatical precision and the English-speaking population sank, in the view of the most curmudgeonly sticklers, into a disgraceful form of semi-literacy.
At first, the society's ranks consisted of Richards and his son. But when the Daily Telegraph published an article about their quest, Richards said he received 500 letters from across the United Kingdom and around the world - including from the United States, the erstwhile colonies where, according to many Britons, the English language had been assailed nearly beyond recognition.
These missives came from grammarians who needed no reminding of the proper uses of the apostrophe: to indicate possession, as in "Richards's life's purpose," or to stand in for letters omitted in the contraction of words such as "could not," as in, "He just couldn't take it anymore." Nor did they need to be admonished that the apostrophe should not be used to make a singular noun plural.
Mr. Richards and his most enthusiastic comrades set about collecting photographic evidence, which they posted on their website, of the extent of modern apostrophe abuse: a line declaring that "Diamond's Are Forever," a handwritten store sign advertising "LOT'S MORE TOY'S INSIDE" and a newsstand where readers could find "NEW'S AND MAGAZINES." They discovered a body art salon that announced itself as offering "TATTOO'S," a concerning error for an establishment whose service was the permanent inking of skin.
More irritating to Richards than the misuse of the apostrophe was its omission, the careless way in which the little squiggle was so often tossed to the wind.
Another disappointment came when the venerable bookseller Waterstone's became Waterstones. If "McDonald's can get it right, then why can't Waterstones?" he told the Telegraph. "You would really hope that a bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English."
"I think that grammar is a valued part of our civilization," Richards told The Washington Post. "I don't like any attempt to diminish it."