At Ease with These Apostrophes

The following is a modified version of a post I made at the Criminal Brief mystery blog almost twenty years ago, griping about the improper use of a common mark of punctuation. Since I have recently observed that its misuse seems to be even worse now than it was then, I'm recycling that column here today. If any of you happen to remember that previous post, I am both proud of you and worried about you. Anyhow, here goes . . .

British author Lynne Truss said years ago that one of the things that prompted her to write the book Eats, Shoots, & Leaves was her sighting one day of a poster on the side of a city bus, announcing the Hugh Grant/Sandra Bullock movie Two Weeks Notice. The missing apostrophe was apparently more than Ms. Truss could bear. She decided, at that moment, to issue a wake-up call on how to use the King's English, and the result was one of the most delightful books on punctuation I've ever read.

Before I proceed, I have a confession to make. I wasn't fond of English in high school and college, and would rather have chugged a bottle of poison than diagram a sentence. Somewhere along the way, I saw the light. Now--whoodathunkit?--I actually enjoy studying things like word usage and sentence construction and punctuation. And, while my interest in that subject does not qualify me to be a grammar policeman and has certainly never led me (thank God) to try to write a style manual, I can at least understand why Ms. Truss became so annoyed by that movie poster. 

The issue here is not only mistakes with apostrophes. If you do happen to be a grammar policeman, you've probably also written lots of tickets for the misuse of semicolons. It sometimes seems that no one in the free world has any idea how to correctly use a semicolon. At least there aren't many semicolons running around out there, since periods or dashes can often step in and do the job for them--but apostrophes (and commas, the worst offenders of all) are everywhere. There are so many of them they can't be avoided.

Besides, apostrophes seem simple to use. Just stick one in before an s now and then, and maybe in the place of an omitted letter or letters, as in isn't or we're or he'll or shouldn't. But there's sometimes more to it than that. One problem is that they're often inserted where they don't belong. How many times have you seen a mailbox that says something like THE ANDERSON'S? I wouldn't argue that the box probably belongs to the Anderson family, but the sign on it should be a plural: THE ANDERSONS. No apostrophe. When I taught writing courses, I saw things like this in beginner's manuscripts all the time: "We asked the Cooper's over for dinner." The Cooper's what? Lawyer? Neighbor? Housekeeper?

It's bad enough when we do this in our own writing, but in her book Ms. Truss gives several examples of the public misuse of apostrophes. Why not let everybody know you slept through those high-school English classes? Here are some signs she mentions having seen: 

TROUSER'S REDUCED

APPLE'S. PEAR'S, CABBAGE'S, CARROT'S

BOBS' MOTORS

MENS COATS

OPEN SEVEN DAY'S AND WEEKEND'S

One was a sign in a park that said GIANT KID'S PLAYGROUND. The apostrophe indeed indicates a possessive, but it's misplaced. She says she wasn't at all surprised that the playground was empty: Everyone was scared of the giant kid.

An example from my own life is the name of a shopping center near the Crossgates subdivision, where I live. The sign in front of the group of shops says, in three-foot-high letters, CROSSGATE'S LANDING. I can only assume it's alerting us that someone named Crossgate will soon be approaching by air, since it makes no sense otherwise.

Writingwise, I should mention here that most editors's tolerance for apostrophe misuse runs low. Former MacAdam/Cage editor Pat Walsh says in 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published, "For the love of Pete, learn how to use an apostrophe. It is not hard and it is screwed up so often it is discouraging."

Granted, some of the rules on its use are a little vague. One involves the possessive apostrophe following a word already ending in an s. Although there are a few exceptions, Strunk and White say you should usually add another s after the apostrophe. (Indiana Jones's partner, Colonel Sanders's recipe, etc.) Other experts have said that final s should never be added. I've even read that you should not add the final s only if the word that follows it begins with an s. (Indiana Jones' sidekick, Colonel Sanders' secret recipe, etc.) So the question is, when do you obey some of these nitpicky rules and when do you ignore them and decide for yourself? My opinion is, so many authorities contradict each other on this particular matter, we're often safe to make our own decisions. When it looks right on paper and sounds right when spoken aloud, it'll probably work. But I do tend to add an s after an s' in most cases.

A comforting fact, according to Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, is that Beachcomber's Law of Conservation of Apostrophes states that a balance exists in nature. "For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its, thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant." By the way, its/it's is the one punctuation mistake you really and truly don't ever want to make, in a manuscript. It seems to defy the rules, since a possessive usually requires an apostrophe, and that's probably the reason this error shows up so much--but commit it at your own risk. To quote Lynne Truss one last time, "If you . . . persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best,' you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot, and buried in an unmarked grave.")

Anyway, that's my take, along with Ms. Truss's considerable assistance, on this pesky little mark of punctuation. What are some of your thoughts on apostrophes and their use/misuse? Please plug them in, in the comments section below. 

I wish I could say I saved the best for last, but I didn't--I'm closing with a piece of my own light verse:

Some writing errors

Give me fits--

Like who's for whose

And it's for its.

If that reaction

Seems excessive, 

Say "Contraction," 

Then "Possessive."

To get the two 

Confused ensures

The prose that's published

Won't be you'res. 

Or mine.

See you in two weeks.