Complex Numbers

Catapostrophe

Trying a slightly different way to present links to the articles I'm discussing. It's not like I never use the xlink ML, but normally I've been using it for secondary links in a blog entry.

Have we murdered the apostrophe?  
Last year, the Apostrophe Protection Society was disbanded, having supposedly failed in its mission. But what is the correct use of the grammatical mark anyway, asks Helene Schumacher.

Okay, look, I'm not saying I never make typing errors --- the term "typo" is itself the wrong word for such things -- but I do believe I have an innate understanding of the difference between its and it's; there, their, and they're; and your and you're. It's really remarkably simple and basic, and I have to fight my natural tendency to assume that anyone who gets it wrong is necessarily a subhuman moron.

Before I go on, though, I'd like to remind readers of Waltz's First Law of the Internet, which is that any post that criticizes someone's spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation will inevitably contain spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. So I wouldn't be surprised if this entry has a few. If I catch one, I'll edit it later.

Apostrophes can be tricky – especially if you’ve never been properly taught how to use them. Faced with a troublesome conundrum, many will err on the side of caution and leave them out altogether. But of course this is technically wrong too, even if a slew of companies arguably set a bad example by doing the same.

No, their not tricky at all. (Okay, that one was on purpose in hopes of subverting Waltz's First Law of the Internet.) The only time I find them tricky at all is when trying to do a possessive of a proper name or a plural ending in -s. "The book that belongs to James." James' book or James's book? "The favorite movie of my favorite people." My friends' favorite movie or My friends's favorite movie? I'm inclined toward the latter in the first example and the former in the second example, but to be honest, I can never remember the rules. So I cheat by rearranging words.

Still, "it's" is really quite remarkably fundamental: it always expands to "it is." Always. Without exception. I think what throws people off is that you say "Robert's blog post" and "its meaning;" that is, pronouns have different rules for possessives than nouns.

The British bookseller Waterstones, the chemist Boots, and the media organisation Reuters are among the many brands that have dropped their apostrophe over the years.

Those are, in my view, stylistic things. If your name is Waterstone and you open a bookstore, you might start out as Waterstone's Books, later dropping the second word to become Waterstone's, after which it's a matter of marketing to drop the apostrophe.

By contrast, the US clothing company Lands’ End is an example of a company that has maintained the use of an incorrect apostrophe and built it into its heritage.

Of course the BBC (or is it just BBC now) pokes fun at an American's misuse of the language.

The so-called 'greengrocer’s apostrophe' – a British phrase referring to the mistaken use of an apostrophe, in a plural noun ('Cauliflower's – two for a pound!') is everywhere.

Here in the US, we don't use the construction "greengrocer," having long ago settled on "grocer." But I have heard it called the "grocer's apostrophe."

But, does it even matter? And who’s to say what’s right or wrong anyhow?

Yes. Yes, it does matter. The more you deviate from accepted norms, the more context is needed to know what's actually meant.

One person who cares more than most about apostrophes is John Richards, who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001.

That said, I'd be sorely, sorely tempted to address a letter to them, with "Apostrophe's Protections' Society." I think I have a bit of troll DNA.

Richards is certainly not alone in feeling so strongly. In the 1980s, the late novelist, playwright and journalist Keith Waterhouse founded and appointed himself Life President of the Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe.

I'd like to found the Association for the Abolition of Asinine Alliteration.

“The AAAA has two simple goals," wrote Waterhouse. "Its first is to round up and confiscate superfluous apostrophes from, for example, fruit and vegetable stalls where potato's, tomato's and apple's are openly on sale. Its second is to redistribute as many as possible of these impounded apostrophes, restoring missing apostrophes where they have been lost, mislaid or deliberately hijacked – as for instance by British Rail, which as part of its refurbishment programme is dismantling the apostrophes from such stations as King's Cross and shunting them off at dead of night to a secret apostrophe siding at Crewe."

As I found this passage particularly amusing, having read it in my mind's voice in a posh London accent, I decided to highlight it here lest you skip the above link and miss it. Your life is now better for having read it.

The apostrophe probably originated in the early 16th Century – either in 1509, in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, courtesy of French printer Geoffroy Tory, who seemingly had a fondness for creating linguistic marks, as he is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla.

Probably just to further distinguish French from English and provide headaches to 21st century American users of Duolingo trying to muddle through French.

Grammatical apostrophes originally denoted absence of a different kind, signalling that something had been removed from a word, usually a vowel that was not pronounced. They were also used to show that several letters were missing, not just one.

Well, clearly, we still use them for that purpose. Don't. Won't. Can't. Bo's'n.

Interestingly enough, the infamous Gadsden flag, originally used during the American Revolution and now adorning enormous pickup trucks all over the US, sports the motto, sic, "dont tread on me." However, it's unclear whether the original Gadsden flags contained the correct apostrophe or not.

During the 17th and 18th Centuries, apostrophes began to be used to indicate the genitive (possessive) role of a noun.

This is, obviously, a much different use than standing in for missing letters.

It’s worth remembering that there has never been a time when people agreed on the ‘correct’ function of the apostrophe. "Not only does such consensus not exist in the past, it doesn’t exist now: the role of this troubling little punctuation mark is still in flux," as Merriam Webster puts it.

People never agree on much of anything. But at some point, there have to be some sort of guidelines, or all is chaos.

However Colin Matthews, head of English at Churchfields Primary School in Beckenham, England, says he doesn’t think the evolution of language is "an excuse not to be clear and unambiguous". For him, teaching grammar is about avoiding ambiguity; it’s not about "knowing how an apostrophe is used; it's about clarity in meaning.”

And that's fair enough.

There are, of course, multitudes who survive perfectly well without knowing how to use apostrophes, but Matthews believes that while there are still prospective employers "who will throw a job application in the bin if the apostrophes are wrong," we need to continue teaching children how to use them correctly.

I have to be honest, here: I was one of those prospective employers. I don't care that your degree is in engineering, not English, but we had to write reports, specifications, letters, emails, narratives, directions on construction drawings, etc. And I wanted to do engineering, not copy editing.

This kind of linguistic ‘gate-keeping’ has been responsible for many precepts, for example the shunning of double negatives (eg ‘I didn't see no-one’). Hundreds of years ago, they were considered perfectly acceptable: highly educated merchants and nobles used them as the norm. Over time, this changed and, MacKenzie says: "the community of English speakers decided that it was no longer a sophisticated or intelligent way of speaking."

Fortunately, that's shifting back again, at least here in the US. Language isn't arithmetic (though it is, in a sense, mathematical), so a double negative doesn't automatically create a positive the way it does in algebra. Instead, in English, a double negative is an intensifier: not just no, but HELL NO.

I'm reminded of a joke about an English teacher who once pointed out that while there are numerous examples of double negatives indeed forming a positive, there's no situation in which a double positive can create a negative -- to which one student replied, "Yeah, right."

Matthews describes it as "a difficult mark" because it has two uses. But the biggest problem with the apostrophe, he says, is that in its possessive usage, it makes a singular noun sound "exactly the same as the plural – and because there’s no difference when you speak it, you have to have the understanding of its purpose in order to get it right when you write it."

Oh, cry me a river. I'm trying to learn French here, and usually the third-person singular sounds exactly the same as the third-person plural; the second-person plural sounds exactly the same as the infinitive and the passé composé... you get the picture. In other words, suck it up and learn it.

Even within what is generally considered to be the 'correct' usage of apostrophes, there can be some variation according to personal preference. For example, 'James' car is red' is correct, but so is 'James's car is red'. There is some debate and ambiguity over whether, if the possessor is a singular noun that happens to end in an -s, an apostrophe should simply be added to the end, or whether an apostrophe and an additional 's' is needed.

AHA! So it's not just me (see above). Yes, I comment on these passages before I read the whole thing, shut up.

Probably the best rule of thumbs is, whichever you decide to use, make sure you are consistent.

"Rule of thumbs?" Is that the proper British English for that idiom? Around here we call it "rule of thumb."

As an aside: a woman once screeched at me for using the phrase "rule of thumb" because "it comes from when it was allowed for a man to beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb." This is arrant nonsense.   There is nothing sexist about the phrase.

Like many linguists, MacKenzie explains that she started out as a "raving prescriptivist", who was militant about punctuation rules, but in time she learned the extent to which these can serve as gate-keeping mechanisms and remove opportunities for some. Linguists aren't grammarians, but rather study how language is used in the real world, she says. "We're not here to tell people what they're doing wrong. We're here to tell people what they're doing is great."

And I think that swings too far in the other direction. Dictionaries are, necessarily, descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. People who back up their arguments citing some dictionary or other are the worst kinds of pedants (and yes, I've done it). But eventually you find yourself waging a losing battle, like whenever someone uses "decimate" incorrectly. "The Black Plague decimated Europe." "No, it didn't; more than 10% of the population died." "Yes, so they were decimated." "No, they were devastated. Decimate means removing one tenth of." "You don't know what your [sic] talking about."

That said, I'm never going to bend on the definition of Blue Moon. It's not the second full moon in a calendar month. Ever.

But, even if we believe there is a correct way to use apostrophes, perhaps we should be a little less quick to judge slip ups. "Language is so tied up in power and class," says Matthews, "and if you can't follow [certain] rules, then you are disadvantaged." By contrast, those in a position of power, such as the companies who choose to drop the apostrophes in their company names, are allowed to change the rules at will.

There is a bit of a power dynamic involved, which is one reason I don't never condemn double negatives; it's a common practice in African-American English, and to deny its use as an intensifier is maybe a little bit on the racist side.

Besides, Mick Jagger did it.

And yet, in most cases, apostrophe use serves a purpose, and as long as it does, we should all make an effort to use them correctly. That said, I usually have to look up the correct uses in New Year's Eve or April Fools' Day. We're talking about a thing that belongs to a singular year, so the apostrophe goes before the s; but all fools are celebrated on April 1, and we are legion, so the apostrophe goes after the s.

Just don't get me started on how some other languages use them to stand in for glottal stops. That's where things get really confusing to English speakers.