"The ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won."

An organisation that was created in 2001 to highlight the importance of the apostrophe has closed down after 18 years in operation. A sad, sad day for the punctuation lovers out there. John Richards, who worked in journalism for much of his career, started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 after he retired. He aimed to preserve the "much-abused" punctuation mark, which is commonly used in the wrong places. Richards announced on his website that that the society was closing down, as "laziness" had won, saying: "With regret I have to announce that, after some 18 years, I have decided to close the Apostrophe Protection Society. "There are two reasons for this. One is that at 96 I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language. "We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!" We're just a little bit disappointed that there was no punctuation errors in the statement. The website (www.apostrophe.org.uk), will remain open to remind all writers of English texts of the correct use of the apostrophe.