People please. Such a tiny little mark. And so abused.
It has just two purposes:
- To signify ownership.
- To signify missing characters.
The most common exception to this rule that I know of (pedants correct me) is with the word "its":
- "It's" means "it is".
- "Its" means the thing belonging to "it". This disambiguation was required in order to separate the two meanings.
And please don't go back over my posts looking for cases where I failed to follow the rules...
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4 comments:
English can be so difficult. Having written a great deal throughout my professional life (who doesn't these days?), I had to master the nature of apostrophes, but could only seem to do it correctly if I looked it up every time. For years I kept a spelling dictionary with proper usage summary in my desk-side bookshelf, and consulted it often.
Then spell-check and grammer-check came along. It's a bit easier now, but the auto-checking algorithms can be wrong too. Still have to know the rules.
Rick, I find that iPhone autocorrect over-uses apostrophes...
Bob,
Re your last paragraph, you do like to take the fun out of things don't you, I could have wasted an entire afternoon perusing your post, and any, what about semicolons hmmmm?
Kevin
Amen! And don't get me started on people not using the Oxford Comma...
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