Tuesday, October 26, 2004
The Apostrophe's Apostrophe
For some reason people have for quite some time enjoyed picking on my use of the Apostrophe. I have never quite understood why, out of all my writing shortcomings, this particular point seems to upset more people then any other, friends like Benjamin Waters, Adam Nealis and even my father. So I thought I would go and read up on precisely how you are meant to use an Apostrophe, and came up with this link. That read it has merely confirmed how I thought an apostrophe should be used, so I am none the wiser. Still going back over some other writing of mine I have noticed that I have a habit of using the apostrophe with acronyms. The problem seems to be that as an unix user I am exceptionally sensitive to capitals, and as such I tend to avoid using them at all, even when it is appropriate. This means that my abbreviations almost always are written in lower case, which then looks very strange with a "s" tacked on the end to pluralise it, hence my use of the apostrophe in such circumstances. Anyway I shall finish this blog with a request that if you ever see inappropriate use of an apostrophe in my writings let me know! That's what the comment section is for ;)
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The funny thing about geeks is that they have to type thousands of lines per day of code in which a single misplaced character has disastrous consequences, but as soon as they have to write prose it's holiday time, and all we get out of them is this shambolic mess of dinky abbreviations, _different_ *conventions* of EMPHASIS sometimes cohabiting in the same sentence, a complete incapacity to use the shift key---in short, a complete disregard for the finer points of writing conventions. This is of course because the geek is usually writing to someone when he is in the midst of solving some problem, and the emphasis is on getting the meaning across as quickly as possible, and by any means possible. In fact the geek's writing style is optimal, it is just optimized for something other than the kind of elegance that one strives for when writing something permanent. It's just that it's hard for the geek to get out of the habit.
ReplyDeleteApostrophe in a nutshell: the apostrophe a) shows that a noun is genitive (possessive); b) shows a contraction.
Problems:
1) In the case of its, as in `hit it on its head' we instinctively feel both that we have seen `its' written `it's', and that there is possession going on, and so we write `hit it on it's head', which is wrong, because `its' is not a genitive noun, it's a possessive pronoun. `It's' is of course the contraction of `it is'. PURE SPECULATION: There may be something logical in the common error that we make. Think about: he/his, she/her/hers, it/its, they/their/theirs, us/our/ours---the general process of making possessive pronouns out of the pronouns is a matter of adding what seems to be a genitive s, and so it is perhaps mere convention that we add an apostrophe for the nouns and not for the pronouns.
2) the perfidious tendency even among good writers to make use of constructions such as `in the 1920's' starts to give the impression that one is allowed to use an apostrophe just to separate the plural s from that which it is pluralizing, when in fact `in the 1920s' is just fine. All sorts of people seem to intuitively feel that there has to be an apostrophe before every s.
3) There is a further case that has actually become officially undecidable. Consider: `on account of his having hit me on the head' / `on account of him having hit me on the head'. Traditionally, because the `having' in this sentence is a noun (known as the gerund) and not a verb, the first version is correct and not the second. But so many people now use the second form that it is now officially allowable (yes language is actually democratic like that). This has implications for our apostrophe. `Due to the pack of wolves having bitten his leg off' is now correct; it is incorrect according to the traditional rules, on account of its missing an apostrophe.