The years end. The year's end. Both are perfectly true. But do they mean the same thing? The years do end; the earth does complete one full revolution round the sun in 365 days. Actually in 365-and-a-quarter days - or where would February 29 in the leap year come from? - but this is no time for puny detail. Having established the truth of the first statement it has to be admitted that the second is true too. This is the year's end. Or as good as. Two absolutely correct statements with completely different meanings. And moods. One almost philosophical in tone, envisaging the receding horizon of the passing years; the other briskly practical perhaps - time to scour the e-card sites - or sad, or relieved. And the years' end? The end of time? It is the tiny apostrophe that makes the difference, a mark of punctuation that changes not just meaning but grammar. The word 'end' is a verb in one sentence, a noun in the others. And now it is the fate of the apostrophe that hangs in the balance.
The apostrophe has been fading for a while. Technology is quite bored with it. Shifting to 'symbols' on the smartphone in the middle of a rapidly tapped-in repartee is too much trouble. Imagine being schoolmarmish on Twitter, when everyone is trying to be the wittiest, the nastiest, the most amazing or attractive being on earth. But such a cavalier attitude does not impress apostrophe lovers. Or rather, people serious about grammar and punctuation, who feel that letting the apostrophe go - making 'the years end' and 'the year's end' look the same - is like allowing vandals to break down the windows and then the doors of intelligibility. The contest between the grammatical laissez faire party and the punctilious punctuation lovers was brought to a head recently by the confession of a "grammar vigilante" in Bristol - he uses a device called the "apostrophiser" - who goes round at night like Wee Willie Winkie (best not get into the linguistic resonances here) either erasing misplaced apostrophes on signboards or adding them where needed. Such fanaticism may be dubious legally - what is the law on defacement? - or psychologically but he cannot but be a favourite of the Apostrophe Protection Society, which is trying to drum up awareness about the endangered species.
It is difficult to say who will win. Technology is quite likely to, since there are databases nowadays which do not recognize the apostrophe. With everything going online, such databases tend to swallow names that have apostrophes, D'Artagnan, for instance. What would the Musketeer do today, if he had to pay his steed's insurance online? But the rise and possible fall of the apostrophe has a moral. If, after all this passion, 'it's' means 'it is' and 'its' is the possessive, there should be some recompense.