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The Apostrophe Conundrum |
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You can send your comments to Rosemarie Ostler at rdostler@aol.com. Rosemarie is a writer living in Eugene, Oregon. NOTE: At the request of regular users, when I shut down Sharpwriter.com in December 2006, I moved some of the content/articles here to my own website. The sometimes quaint page design is from long ago. Questions: John T. Cullen |
Just when apostrophes seem to have disappeared for good, they turn up in a new location. Only a few years ago, English teachers were mourning the loss of the possessive apostrophe in phrases like todays specials and womens rights. Now apostrophes are back, but the trend is to use them with plurals. I have spotted signs with examples like burger and fry's, our special's, and 100 Year's of Excellence. And of course we have all seen, hanging from thousands of houses, plaques with some variation of the Smith's printed on them. This spelling of the name itself is unquestionably right if only one person named Smith lives in the house and the sign is meant to indicate that he or she owns the place. Otherwise, it's problematic. Lately the plural apostrophe trend has spread to people who write for a living. Printed greeting cards carry messages like May you have many joy's and Grandma's are best. I have even read whether it's effects have been studied and her's is the kind of career I want in national magazines. Clearly, apostrophe confusion is widespread. Maybe that's because apostrophes have hopped around so much over the centuries. Their original purpose when they first appeared in the Sixteenth Century was to indicate missing letters in a word: o'er, th'effect, couldn't. Shakespeare is full of these elisions. "A bear't that th'opposed may beware of thee," and "A 'tis in my memory lock'd" are just two examples chosen at random. Usages were far from uniform in those days. People were just as likely to write cant or ca'nt as can't. It took almost two hundred years for apostrophes to spread to possessives. They were probably first used around the end of the Seventeenth Century to indicate omission of e from the Old English possessive singular es ending, for example mannes, which became man's. Eventually the apostrophe spread to all possessives, even those that didn't originally have an e. Then it went further and spread to certain plurals, especially of words that ended in an s sound or a vowel, and foreign loan words. The printer's statement We do confess errata's is an example of this usage. The fact is, writers scattered apostrophes pretty much according to their own personal taste until at least the mid-Nineteenth Century. James Fenimore Cooper, a great writer but not a great speller, wrote Midshipmans pay in an 1823 business letter. In the same letter, he made lavish use of apostrophes in forms like burn'd, ship'd, belong'd, remov'd, reflecting the new trend of not pronouncing ed as a separate syllable. Later, this apostrophe usage disappeared and the ed spelling came back, even though we still pronounce the ending the same as Cooper did. In the late Nineteenth Century, the language critics went to work establishing rules for English grammar and spelling. They forbade the use of apostrophes with plural s, and ever since that time writers have avoided them—at least until recently. Maybe one day apostrophes will make a complete shift, gradually slipping off possessives and then quietly resurfacing on plurals. Until then, we have modern apostrophe rules. These are actually fairly straightforward, with one or two special twists just to lend interest. Apostrophes are still used to indicate lost letters. The most typical examples of this usage are the contraction of an auxiliary verb with not—I can't and won't do itand the contraction of a noun or pronoun with is, has, or have—I've never done it before. Some tricky pairs to watch out for are its/it's, whose/who's, and your/you're. If the pronoun is a possessive—its, whose, or your—don't use an apostrophe (more about possessive pronouns below). If it's a contraction of two words, use an apostrophe to show the missing letters. Whose puppy is it? It's not really your puppy, but its idea is that you're the one who's taking it home. The classic rule for apostrophes with possessive nouns is simple: all singular nouns form possessive by adding 's, whether the noun itself ends in s or not. Some examples are the management's problem, this bus's next stop, Mary's dachshund, Mr. Withers's cocker spaniel. For plural possessives, just add an apostrophe unless the plural doesn't end in s: the dogs' dinners, but the children's hot dogs. Possessive pronouns, on the other hand, do not take an apostrophe: What's yours is mine, but what's ours is theirs, unless it's his or hers. Other exceptions to the 's rule are names from the classics and names that end in an "iz" sound, both of which traditionally take a plain apostrophe: Moses', Venus', Socrates'. Where the 's goes in a compound phrase depends on who owns what. Joint ownership calls for only one possessive; ownership of more than one item calls for multiples: my mother and father's cocker spaniel, but my sister's and brother's Weimaraners. Pronouns are always in the possessive form, even if there's joint ownership: my and my husband's dog, not me and my husband's dog, and definitely not I and my husband's dog. Plural numbers, letters, and abbreviations also take apostrophes, as in Ph.D.'s, p's and q's, and 1800's, but this usage is becoming less frequent. Many people now simply write 1800s or CODs, and that's considered fine. Simple plural nouns do not take apostrophes. Special, joy, and grandma are pluralized with a plain s. Words that end in an s sound, like boss or buzz, get an es ending. That includes proper nouns. Mr. and Mrs. Withers are the Witherses (not the Withers'), and their dog is the Witherses' dog. Forms like Withers' are appearing more often in writing these days, but the above rule is the original. These are the apostrophe basics. Stick to them and your apostrophes will be scattered in all the right places, and none of the wrong ones, ninety-eight percent of the time. For those who want to study the apostrophe conundrum in all its complexity, any good style manual can lead the way through such intricacies as possessives before the word sake—is it heaven or heaven's?—and how do we handle seriously bottlenecked possessives like England's Queen's estate's profits? The New Fowler's Modern English Usage is a good place to start. Copyright © 2001 by Rosemarie Ostler |