Believe it or not, the center of social life here in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is the Wegmans supermarket. You almost have to feel sorry for a town that leans so heavily upon a retail food emporium for its diversions, but if you knew Wegmans, you’d understand. The place is a vast indoor theme park for the gastronomically inclined. Everyone congregates around the cafe, with its sushi counter and cappuccino bar, its European bread bakery and gourmet food performance artists. But the entire store is a festival of ripe overabundance. Stroll through the fresh produce department and you’ll encounter a United Nations of vegetables, sensuously displayed under a fine mist: gobo root and opo squash, batata and nira grass. You can buy tomatoes as big as grapefruits or as small as grapes, in red, orange, yellow, green or purple. You can choose from 37 different pre-packaged salads and hundreds of cheeses from the most refined cows and sheep of Europe. You can buy hummus -- not just your ordinary pedestrian supermarket hummus, but LEMON-DILL hummus. And tapenade. And bruschetta, and ratatouille, and something called tartinade de tofu. Go to the pet department and gawk at the mindboggling array of rawhide chew treats for dogs. I counted 98 different varieties of these leathery confections: bowtie-shaped, bone-shaped, and bagel-shaped... in gourmet flavors like peanut butter, lamb & rice, cheese & bacon, yeast & garlic... basted or non-basted. When a supermarket offers 98 varieties of rawhide chew treats, you know you’re not in Bangladesh. Wegmans represents American consumer civilization at its unapologetic zenith.

So what am I cynical about? Shouldn’t I be grateful to live within walking distance of a store that enables American dogs to enjoy a higher standard of culinary fare than half the population of Sub-Saharan Africa? Believe me, I’m grateful. What bothers me -- and forgive me if I sound petty or pompous, but hear me out -- what bothers me about Wegmans is the logo: WEGMANS. Just like that, with no apostrophe. As a writer and former editor, I can tell you that the apostrophe is a useful and even indispensable device for attributing ownership or possession, as well as for contracting cumbersome words and phrases to make them more streamlined. Instead of saying "Wegman his store," as we would have done in Henry VIII’s time, we contract it to "Wegman’s store" and finally just plain Wegman’s. To drop the apostrophe is to imply not that Mr. Wegman owns a store, but that he exists in the plural. (If we have more than one Wegman, shouldn’t they be Wegmen?) Maybe you’re familiar with apostrophes yourself and can vouch for their usefulness. But the art directors who create logos apparently view apostrophes as so much graphic dandruff to be brushed off the shoulders of their sleek designs. Art directors aren’t noted for their extreme literacy, yet they invariably persuade the higher powers to adopt their logos over the protests of the copywriters and other wretched pedantic types who toil at the corporate headquarters.

The rise of Internet communication has probably scuttled our traditional use of punctuation even more blatantly than the Wegmans logo. I’ve seen message board posts of three or four sentences without a single period to let the reader know where one sentence stops and its successor begins. For that matter, you can look in vain for commas and capitalization to light your path through the prose. Semi-colons? They’re history; we don’t want to think about relationships between two independent clauses when we can just as easily think about relationships between celebrities. After all, independent clauses aren’t nearly as good-looking as celebrities and don’t have half as much fun in bed. Colons are even worse: we all know what comes out of them. Question marks are expendable, aren’t they. Like, who cares. Quotation marks will be "dead as a doornail" once we stop reading passages worth quoting, which should be any month now. We can live without those dotty little ellipses... and hyphens are already taking on an archaic look as we compulsively unify words like "coworker" -- even though the end-product looks distinctly bovine. As for dashes, they don’t even rate a key of their own on most keyboards. Exclamation points will probably be the last to go because they help lackluster sentences look more exciting, and most of us who write need all the help we can get!

So it appears that punctuation is gradually falling into disfavor, along with manners, chastity and songs you can actually hum. If we want to see the familiar commas and apostrophes of our youth, we’ll eventually have to hang out at used book stores. Too bad: when we discard punctuation we discard logic and clarity. We discard civilization itself. No wonder we’re so eager to get rid of our dashes and quotation marks. And where will the demise of punctuation leave those of us who have spent a lifetime mastering its demanding intricacies? How will we show off our skills and feel superior to the unlettered masses? We’ll be like scholars of Classical Greek, once the epitomes of erudition and respectability, now reduced to conjugating irregular verbs on the backs of envelopes when nobody is looking. It doesn’t seem fair; basketball players and rock climbers still have ample opportunities to strut their stuff. All we ask is a chance to play with our hyphens and semi-colons! But what’s the point of pursuing yet another lost cause? Right now, one of my online readers is probably dashing off an irate e-mail: ‘punctuation is for losers writing should be intuitive who needs all those little dots and squiggles anyway get a life’ Yes, I look forward to hearing from the art director who designed the logo for Wegmans.