Monday, February 4, 2019

The Apostrophe 


People please.  Such a tiny little mark.  And so abused.

It has just two purposes:
  • To signify ownership.
  • To signify missing characters.
To see some of the worst abuses, look at any number of craigslist ads...  people in there seem to think that if a word ends in "s", then every third time or so, an apostrophe must be inserted.  Randomly, as far as I can tell.

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.
There are a few other special cases - see this article if you are unsure.



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:

Rick said...

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.

Robert Salnick said...

Rick, I find that iPhone autocorrect over-uses apostrophes...

Kevin McNeill said...

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

Anonymous said...

Amen! And don't get me started on people not using the Oxford Comma...

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