Comments on: Much Ado About Possessive Apostrophes http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/ The English Language & Usage Stack Exchange Blog Fri, 04 Nov 2016 17:12:43 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.6 By: Michael http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-94470 Wed, 08 Jan 2014 19:24:01 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-94470 I’m surprised you didn’t include the possessive “its”. It doesn’t have an apostrophe at all! It took me years to differentiate it from “it’s”, when I realized it followed the same form as “his” and “hers”.

]]> By: StoneyB http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-2435 Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:31:34 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-2435 Shaw eliminated apostrophes (which he called “uncouth bacilli”) from his texts, and I’ve never missed them. He also used l e t t e r s p a c i n g  instead of italics for emphasis, which takes a little more getting used to.

]]> By: Barrie England http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-2411 Wed, 21 Nov 2012 07:45:11 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-2411 I think Geoffrey Pullum said somewhere that the apostrophe was the 27th letter of the alphabet.

]]> By: kitfox http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-2404 Wed, 21 Nov 2012 01:07:51 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-2404 Yeah, some weird WordPress thing. I think I fixed them with straight quotes. Thanks.

]]> By: kitfox http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-2403 Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:56:10 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-2403 I didn’t tell people that the apostrophe makes an “iz” sound, or any other sound for that matter. Apostrophes don’t make any sound as far as I’ve ever understood it.

]]> By: tchrist http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-2401 Tue, 20 Nov 2012 23:42:56 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-2401 I wish you would not try to tell people that the apostrophe makes an “iz” sound. It really does not.

]]> By: Barrie England http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-2377 Tue, 20 Nov 2012 08:57:28 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-2377 The apostrophe came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, and has caused trouble ever since. Even now, anomalies abound. There is one underground station in London called Earl’s Court and another, two stops away, called Barons Court. My son went to St Edmund’s School, but my Oxford college is St Edmund Hall.

The post sets out to cover only the possessive apostrophe, but it’s perhaps worth saying there are two further uses. One is to indicate missing letters in contractions such as ‘don’t’. The other is to make plurals where its absence might be confusing, as in ‘if’s and but’s’ and, more controversially, in ‘1970’s’ and ‘CD’s’.

There is a case for abolishing the apostrophe altogether, one which Peter Harvey makes here: http://lavengro.typepad.com/peter_harvey_linguist/2008/11/apostrophes.html

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By: Timothy (TRiG) http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-2358 Tue, 20 Nov 2012 03:05:37 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-2358 That’s probably a quirk of WordPress. The apostrophes come after some HTML (because the words are underlined) so WP interprets them as opening quotation marks. There’s probably some way around it.

TRiG.

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By: StoneyB http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/11/much-ado-about-possessive-apostrophes/#comment-2354 Mon, 19 Nov 2012 19:30:11 +0000 http://english.blogoverflow.com/?p=421#comment-2354 Admirable. Everything needed in one place. Just one niggle: all your apostrophes before the final section (The Advanced) are turned — left single quote /‘/ instead of right single quote /’/.

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