Following good manners and financial responsibility, English grammar is just the latest casualty in the ongoing collapse of Western civilisation.

I’m not even being hyperbolic. The defilement of our mother tongue has become so commonplace it can be seen practically everywhere. From newspapers to taxis, from notices to billboards, again and again one crime keeps cropping up – failure to use an apostrophe properly.

What’s worrying is how many Russell Group undergrads continue to make this mistake. Students at prestigious unis such as Cambridge, Warwick and err Cardiff somehow manage to betray a long tradition of literature and litter their dissertations, posters and graffiti with unnecessary apostrophes. It may not be as bad as confusing your with you’re, but Milton would be rolling in his grave.

How is anyone getting accepted into an academic institution if they still think an apostrophe turns a singular into a plural? Honestly, there’s no excuse for this kind of behaviour, unless you have a tremor in your writing/typing hand that makes you taint your otherwise probably good work with one of the foulest crimes known to man.

It’s a tragedy we’ve let apostrophe mis-use go on for so long. She’s a magnificent thing, the apostrophe. The way she effortlessly omits a few letters, the way she gracefully shows possession. It’s all enough to make even the Bard himself blush.

Unfortunately, however, I am but one man, and quite an unnoticeable one at that, so my words may be buried under a pile of cat videos, pornography and more interesting Tab articles. Fortunately, however, this is bigger than me, for a group of my grammar Nazi brothers have banded together in an effort to save the apostrophe. Goose-stepping into formation, these heroes of literature, led by a man named John Richards, have established the Apostrophe Protection Society.

Of course the English language is an ever-evolving thing. One minute you’re having a werigmod æfenleoð, the next minute you’re taking selfies with bae, YOLO. So why try and drag unfashionable punctuation marks from the jaws of death? Obviously it’s all hopeless, but that simply isn’t the British way. That’s why, since its founding in 2001, the Apostrophe Protection Society has endeavoured to politely preserve “the correct use of this currently much-abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language”.

So come on everyone, let’s be torch-bearers of literature and language again and salvage what’s left of one of the few good things handed to us by our grandparents.