I ditched WhatsApp a few days ago.

I was mostly worried about friends in Asia and Africa, because phonecalls and SMSes will be prohibitively expensive, but my worries were unfounded: north'ard of 90% of my contacts have already migrated to Signal and WhatsApp — about fifty-fifty, as far as I can tell — so out went WhatsApp. No more Facebook apps for me, thanks.

Just out of curiousity, why do you write "northward" as "north'ard"? The contraction doesn't make sense as you are omitting one character to replace it with another. Is it to convey accent or is it common where you are to write it this way?

> The contraction doesn't make sense as you are omitting one character to replace it with another.

Are you saying that it's pointless to replace the w with an apostrophe because the number of characters doesn't change? If so, this is not how contractions work. The point isn't to reduce the number of characters in writing, the point is to indicate in writing where letters have been omitted in the spoken pronunciation of the contraction.

> Are you saying that it's pointless to replace the w with an apostrophe because the number of characters doesn't change?

That is something very common, isnot it?

Another common thing to do is replace the characters with something different:

  should have
  should've
  should of

As I said elsewhere when I said convey accent, I meant pronunciation. So in that situation I understand it's use, I just hadn't heard it pronounced like that before.

Haha, I guess I have sung this sea shanty too often: https://youtu.be/He7X5jGt8lY

— and I would like to add that in addition to omitted letters, the apostrophy can also indicate pronunciation (which is the case here).

Huh. Your comments made me wonder if there are any English words, perhaps acknowledged in a dictionary, containing punctuation. A quick poking around suggests the answer is: no.

I don't think that is true. Look at what your sentence fragment would be:

the a'os'rophy can al'o in'i'ate pro'nun'i'tion

If you leave out those letters you are omitting the important beginning sounds of each sylible. You generally want to highlight that sound and hide unnecessary characters.

If you had taken the time to listen to the video, you would have heard that the 'w' in 'northward' was indeed omitted in the pronunciation as well as in the spelling.

I guess that is what I meant by conveying accent, but pronunciation is the correct term, evidently escaping me at the time.

Pretty awesome, that.

Why is this downvoted? The usual paid-to-brigade people coming in?

No idea.

In your case it is probably because of name-calling.

Personally I usually don't downvote people for asking nicely why something was downvoted (when it isn't totally obvious) even if I know it is against the rules but the the moment name-calling starts any hesitation goes out the window.

I'm not paid and I just downvoted you because I really dislike this kind of comment.

It's unverifiable mud-slinging and your tone was brusque and dismissive.

It’s also complaining about downvotes which is explicitly against the rules.