Tuesday was 15 August - International Apostrophe Day! No better time to have a little look at the state-of-arts around th pesky little mark we just don’t seem to get right. BEWARE! There will be a wee bit of grammar… 😮😬😱😭
‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.’ A perfectly un-apostrophied sentence worthy of its owner, the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw absolutely loathed the poor little punctuation mark, alleging it was a total waste of space, an unnecessary baggage just cluttering the airy expansiveness of paper blanks. Much in keeping with the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century which started to move away from the frills and precious extras of the decadent fin-de-siècle aesthetics of art nouveau, and the likes of Oscar Wilde and William Morris. Space, transparency, clarity, straight lines (androgynous flapper-silhouette anyone?): those were the values of the time beginning to exert influence over visual art, architecture, and punctuation, too.
The apostrophe, Shaw alleged, is not required in most sentences: “thats what she said” is perfectly understandable without the ‘ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli,’ swarming across clean sentences, and making them sick! Only when it does away with ambiguity may an apostrophe sneak between two words, for instance “it’s time” and “its time”, standing for “it is” (as in “it is time” and “its” (as in “Sexism in Hollywood is rife, but now its time is up.”). So what are the rules of this little top-line comma, after all? Here’s your ultimate apostrophe cheat-sheet!
Okay, I’m neither a grammar guru nor a grammar fetishist, but there are just two things you need to know about the apostrophe, and those are actually quite helpful in clarifying relationships of elements in the sentences (are you listening, Shaw?!). Apostrophes:
(1) flag up that a letter has disappeared
(2) signal possession
So, when “they are” dumbasses contracts to “they’re”, the apostrophe works as grammar police, and lets us know the “a” has been swallowed. Or as a historian documenting the archeology of the parcel of words. When we’re hearing speech, we naturally make sense of contractions within the context of the sentence and situation, and we’re incredibly good at that. But when we’re reading, there’s a bit of a barrier of processing those random shapes called letters, so the apostrophe (and all other punctuation marks) intends to help us make sense faster.
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Letter contraction or “elision” is pretty straightforward, but now it gets sticky: possession.
(a) one person owns something: the girl’s diary. So far so good!
(b) two or more people own something: the girls’ diary.
This looks strange. But it’s correct. English marks plural with an -s at the end of the word in most cases, so keeping both plural -s and possessive -s would look like “the girls’s diary”. That might seem more consistent but it’s actually not (we’ll get to that in a minute). So, the apostrophe jumps around the s whether the thing or person owning something is singular or plural.
And if that wasn’t enough, it gets even stickier: if you have a singular noun ending in -s or -x, the apostrophe+s rule applies, but the pronunciation changes: you need to read Bridget Jones’s Diary as /Joneses/.
If the noun is a classical name, you treat it as if it was plural, like “Aristophanes’ punctuation” (pronounced as if there were no apostrophe at all). This rule is not accepted everywhere, though. So, where does all of this minute shifting of letters and apostrophes originate? Way back, it turns out!
According to linguistics professor David Crystal, the possessive -s stems not from the Renaissance habit of putting the pronoun as possessive (“the king his book” morphing to “the kingis book” and eventually to “the king’s book”), but rather from the Old English case system, signalling the possessive case through -es or -ys- or -is. Over the centuries, the vowel would fall away, leaving only the apostrophized-s behind. So, in the possessive, the apostrophe again shows where one or more letters have vanished. In the plural, I guess “the girlses book” would technically become “the girls’ book”, because the final “-es” are gone. But this is just a guess, and requires some rabbit-holing. It’s been a long time since I’ve dabbled in Old English cases…
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Marking contracted letters and possession aren’t the only tasks of apostrophes, so plenty of nerding to come! If you ask me, I love the apostrophe for its power to change the meaning of a cluster of words in total disproportion to its size. Ant-like! What I dislike is when people judge others for what they perceive as poor grammar, and sadly, the presence, absence, or “incorrect” use of ’ often acts as a double for insecure people who need to feel superior to others because they can remember a rule that, more often that not, originates from contradictory random and absurd historical circumstances. There are lots of apostrophe kinks we haven’t yet ironed out. Grammarians still disagree. Rules are not set in stone. We chisel that stone, but there’s nothing natural about it. We could literally decide to implement different spelling and punctuation rules tomorrow, collectively, and we’d still speak and write English just fine. An apostrophe here or there is not the end of the world. It does, however, make for interesting double-entrendre…
If you want to read a longer reflection on the apostrophe with some focus on Shakespeare, check out my blog entry here.