Helen Meads (sic) column (We should fight to save apostrophes, December 9) tickled me - especially when she managed to get an inverted comma at the start of one sentence without its corresponding equivalent at the end.

As the self-proclaimed President of the York Society of Practising Pedants and a former English teacher, I pride myself on knowing how to place apostrophes. My ultimate aim, however, is to see them abolished. They are an inconvenience, a trap for the unwary and an entirely unnecessary element of our punctuation.

I challenge anyone who seeks to prove me wrong, since English conveniently has an alternative way of indicating the possessive through the use of one little word - ‘of’. I also rely on the fact that apostrophes are not needed to indicate elisions such as ‘didnt’, since we manage to understand them perfectly well spoken aloud.

Clive Goodhead,

Rowley Court, Earswick, York