Think of the wildly variant situations evoked by the phrases "the mother's child" and "the mothers' child". With the death of the apostrophe, we will lose a fragment of subtlety in our linguistic arsenal.
Most people know how gauche it would be to use "comic sans" font on a poster design, but a missing apostrophe isn't an embarrassment. The AWOL apostrophe is ubiquitous. It is present in catalogues for major retailers and glossy corporate brochures.
I'd beg for a recall and pulping of the flyer if my business had just proclaimed to thousands of customers that "Our Visions Your Vision". The reality is that there is never a recall, a correction, or a trace of post-apostrophe-neglect sheepishness and this tells me that the possessive apostrophe is on life-support. It won't be long before the apostrophe in contractions joins it and "Our Visions Your Vision. Were going places".
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If we're going to lose a punctuation mark to neglect, I demand another be instated. Perhaps the interrobang, a typographical merger of the question mark and exclamation mark, would lend itself to Facebook status updates, tweets and texts in a way that the apostrophe does not. Then I could at least type, You did what on New Years Eve`
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