In a “counter-argument” to Lynne Truss‘ wildly successful tirade against poor grammar, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Australian linguistics professor Kate Burridge has published Weeds in the Garden of Words, “a book that celebrates slang and poor punctuation.” In a story for The Independent by Genevieve Roberts, Burridge says, “Today’s weeds — non-grammatical expressions and pronunciations — are often rewarding garden species if left to grow.” For example, she says that “E-mail chat over the internet is a kind of speech written down, it has loosened the straitjacket effect to language that writing had. For example, the word ‘gonna’, as opposed to ‘going to’, is a marker of future time to replace ‘will’.” But so far Burridge is not getting the ecstatic reception Truss experienced. “When I suggested on radio that the possessive apostrophe should be dropped from the language because people get it wrong so often, you would have thought that a public flogging would not have been a severe enough punishment,” she tells Roberts. “I received hate mail, and letters from the apostrophe support group, though not all of them used the apostrophe correctly.”