Comments on: Much Ado About Possessive Apostrophes

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 19:24:01 +0000

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

StoneyB — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:31:34 +0000

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

Barrie England — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 07:45:11 +0000

I think Geoffrey Pullum said somewhere that the apostrophe was the 27th letter of the alphabet.

By: kitfox

kitfox — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 01:07:51 +0000

Yeah, some weird WordPress thing. I think I fixed them with straight quotes. Thanks.

By: kitfox

kitfox — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:56:10 +0000

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

tchrist — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 23:42:56 +0000

I wish you would not try to tell people that the apostrophe makes an "iz" sound. It really does not.

By: Barrie England

Barrie England — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 08:57:28 +0000

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

By: Timothy (TRiG)

Timothy (TRiG) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 03:05:37 +0000

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.

By: StoneyB

StoneyB — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 19:30:11 +0000

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 /’/.