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Richards, a former newspaper subeditor, provided standard letters that could be sent to correct apostrophe misusers
24 April 2021 • 9:24am
John Richards in 2019, when he left the Apostrophe Protection Society because he felt ‘the barbarians have won’
Credit: Tom Maddick /SWNS
John Richards, who has died aged 97, was once described as the “Don Quixote of the grammar world”, as founder proprietor of the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS), which he established in 2001 in an attempt to save an endangered species.
The usefulness of the apostrophe was memorably made clear when Kingsley Amis, challenged to produce a sentence whose meaning depended on a possessive apostrophe, came up with three versions of the same sentence: “Those things over there are my husband’s; Those things over there are my husbands’, and Those things over there are my husbands.”
A retired British newspaperman, he founded the Apostrophe Protection Society to guard against the erosion of a humble yet essential element of the English language.