I was going to begin this blog entry by establishing the fanciful notion that apostrophes are prey to big game hunters. I intended then to propose this as an explanation of why their numbers have been so depleted in recent years, their absence from their usual haunts becoming more pronounced all the time. After that I’d have suggested that they often appear where they don’t belong as a means of evading the hunters, who have forced them to adapt to new, unfamiliar territory.

Then, no doubt, I would have speculated on how this enforced flexibility might affect their evolution, foreseeing future apostrophes more adaptable than any other punctuation mark, and probably concluding that, in the event of a nuclear blast, they will be one of the few creatures to survive, and there’ll be an evolutionary battle between them and the cockroaches to determine which becomes the dominant species.

And I’d probably have tried to work in some word play about the hunters putting them in apostrophy cabinets at some point.

But now I come to write it, I realise it’s not remotely amusing, so I don’t think I’ll bother.