Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

The Tractable Apostrophe

In the spring of 2001 the ITV1 show Popstars manufactured a pop phenomenon for our times: a singing group called Hear’Say. The announcement of the Hear’Say name was quite a national occasion, as I recall; people actually went out in very large numbers to buy their records; meanwhile, news-papers, who insist on precision in matters of address, at once learned to place Hear’Say’s apostrophe correctly and attend to the proper spacing. To refer in print to this group as Hearsay (one word) would be wrong, you see. To call it Hear-Say (hyphenated) would show embarrassing ignorance of popular culture. And so it came to pass that Hear’Say’s poor, oddly placed little apostrophe was replicated everywhere and no one gave a moment’s thought to its sufferings. No one saw the pity of its position, hanging there in eternal meaninglessness, silently signalling to those with eyes to see, “I’m a legitimate punctuation mark, get me out of here.” Checking the Hear’Say website a couple of years later, I discover that the only good news in this whole sorry saga was that, well, basically, once Kym had left to marry Jack in January 2002 – after rumours, counter-rumours and official denials – the group thankfully folded within eighteen months of its inception.

Now, there are no laws against imprisoning apostrophes and making them look daft. Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it. But the naming of Hear’Say in 2001 was nevertheless a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy. As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price. Too many jobs have been heaped on this tiny mark, and – far from complaining – the apostrophe has seemingly requested “More weight”, just like that martyrish old codger in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, when religious bigots in black hats with buckles on are subjecting him to death by crushing. “More weight,” the apostrophe has bravely said – if ever more faintly. “More weight,” it manages to whisper still. But I ask you: how much more abuse must the apostrophe endure? Now that it’s on its last legs (and idiotic showbiz promoters stick apostrophes in names for purely decorative purposes), isn’t it time to recognise that the apostrophe needs our help?

The English language first picked up the apostrophe in the 16th century. The word in Greek means “turning away”, and hence “omission” or “elision”. In classical texts, it was used to mark dropped letters, as in t’cius for “tertius”; and when English printers adopted it, this was still its only function. Remember that comical pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost saying, “You find not the apostraphas, and so miss the accent”? Well, no, of course you don’t, nobody remembers anything said by that frightful bore, and we certainly shan’t detain ourselves bothering to work out what he was driving at. All we need to know is that, in Shakespeare’s time, an apostrophe indicated omitted letters, which meant Hamlet could say with supreme apostrophic confidence: “Fie on’t! O fie!”; “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d”; and even, “I am too much i’ the sun” – the latter, incidentally, a clear case of a writer employing a new-fangled punctuation mark entirely for the sake of it, and condemning count-less generations of serious long-haired actors to adopt a knowing expression and say i’ – as if this actually added anything to the meaning.

If only the apostrophe’s life had stayed that simple. At some point in the 17th century, however, printers started to intrude an apostrophe before the “s” in singular possessive cases (“the girl’s dress”), and from then on quite frankly the whole thing has spiralled into madness. In the 18th century, printers started to put it after plural possessives as well (“the girls’ dresses”). Some historians of grammar claim, incidentally, that the original possessive use of the apostrophe signified a contraction of the historic “his”; and personally, I believed this attractive theory for many years, simply on the basis of knowing Ben Jonson’s play Sejanus, his Fall, and reasoning that this was self-evidently halfway to “Sejanus’s Fall”. But blow me, if there aren’t differences of opinion. There are other historians of grammar who say this Love-His-Labour-Is-Lost explanation is ignorant conjecture and should be forgotten as soon as heard. Certainly the Henry-His-Wives (Henry’s Wives) rationalisation falls down noticeably when applied to female possessives, because “Elizabeth Her Reign” would have ended up logically as “Elizabeth’r Reign”, which would have had the regrettable result of making people sound a) a bit stupid, b) a bit drunk, or c) a bit from the West Country.

So what are the jobs an apostrophe currently has on its CV? Before we start tearing out our hair at sloppy, ignorant current usage, first let us acknowledge the sobering wisdom of the Oxford Companion to English Literature: “There never was agolden age in which the rules for the possessive apostrophe were clear-cut and known, understood and followed by most educated people.” And then let us check that we know the rules of what modern grammarians call “possessive determiners” and “possessive pronouns” – none of which requires an apostrophe.

Possessive determiners

my our

your your

his their

her their

its their

Possessive pronouns

mine ours

yours yours

his theirs

hers theirs

its theirs

And now, let us just count the various important tasks the apostrophe is obliged to execute every day.

1 It indicates a possessive in a singular noun:

This seems simple. But not so fast, Batman. When the possessor is plural, but does not end in an “s”, the apostrophe similarly precedes the “s”:

But when the possessor is a regular plural, the apostrophe follows the “s”:

I apologise if you know all this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying “Giant Kid’s Playground”, and then wonder why everyone stays away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)

2 It indicates time or quantity:

3 It indicates the omission of figures in dates:

4 It indicates the omission of letters:

However, it is generally accepted that familiar contractions such as bus (omnibus), flu (influenza), phone (telephone), photo (photograph) and cello (violoncello) no longer require apologetic apostrophes. In fact to write “Any of that wine left in the ’fridge, dear?” looks today self-conscious, not to say poncey. Other contractions have made the full leap into new words, anyway. There is simply nowhere to hang an apostrophe on “nuke” (explode a nuclear device), “telly” (television) or “pram” (perambulator) – although, believe me, people have tried.

Most famously of all, the apostrophe of omission creates the word “it’s”:

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler. The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands for “it is” or “it has”. If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has” then what you require is “its”. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

5 It indicates strange, non-standard English:

A forest of apostrophes in dialogue (often accompanied by unusual capitalisation) conventionally signals the presence in a text of a peasant, a cockney or an earnest northerner from whom the heart-chilling word “nobbut” may soon be heard. Here is what the manly gamekeeper Mellors says to his employer’s wife in chapter eight of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

“Why don’t you speak ordinary English?” Lady Chatterley inquires, saucily.

6 It features in Irish names such as O’Neill and O’Casey:

Again the theory that this is a simple contraction – this time of “of” (as in John o’ Gaunt) – is pure woolly misconception. Not a lot of people know this, but the “O” in Irish names is an anglicisation of “ua”, meaning grandson.

7 It indicates the plurals of letters:

8 It also indicates plurals of words:

I hope that by now you are already feeling sorry for the apostrophe. Such a list of legitimate apostrophe jobs certainly brings home to us the imbalance of responsibility that exists in the world of punctuation. I mean, full stops are quite important, aren’t they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burn-out from all the thankless effort. Only one significant task has been lifted from the apostrophe’s workload in recent years: it no longer has to appear in the plurals of abbreviations (“MPs”) or plural dates (“1980s”). Until quite recently, it was customary to write “MP’s” and “1980’s” – and in fact this convention still applies in America. British readers of The New Yorker who assume that this august publication is in constant ignorant error when it allows “1980’s” evidently have no experience of how that famously punctilious periodical operates editorially.

But it is in the nature of punctuation lovers to care about such things, and I applaud all those who seek to protect the apostrophe from misuse. For many years Keith Waterhouse operated an Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe in the Daily Mirror and then the Daily Mail, cheered on by literally millions of readers.He has printed hundreds of examples of apostrophe horrors, my all-time favourite being the rather subtle, “Prudential – were here to help you”, which looks just a bit unsettling until you realise that what it’s supposed to say is, “Prudential – we’re here to help you”. And Keith Water-house has many successors in the print. Kevin Myers, columnist of The Irish Times, recently published a fictional story about a man who joins the League of Signwriter’s and Grocer’s and Butcher’s Assistant’s, only to discover that his girlfriend is a stickler for grammatical precision.

Meanwhile, William Hartston, who writes the “Beachcomber” column in The Express, has come up with the truly inspired story of the Apostropher Royal, an ancient and honourable post inaugurated in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. His story goes that a humble greengrocer (in days of yore) was delivering potatoes to Good Queen Bess and happened to notice a misplaced apostrophe in a royal decree. When he pointed it out, the Queen immediately created the office of Apostropher Royal, to control the quality and distribution of apostrophes and deliver them in wheelbarrows to all the greengrocers of England on the second Thursday of every month (Apostrophe Thursday). The present Apostropher Royal, Sir D’Anville O’M’Darlin’, concerns himself these days with such urgent issues as the tendency of “trendy publishers” to replace quotation marks with colons and dashes, the effect of which is that pairs of unwanted inverted commas can be illegally shipped abroad, split down the middle to form low-grade apostrophes and sold back to an unwary British public.

Do people other than professional writers care, though? Well, yes, and I have proof in heaps. As I was preparing for this book, I wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph, hoping to elicit a few punctuation horror stories, and it was like detonating a dam. Hundreds of emails and letters arrived, all of them testifying to the astonishing power of recall we sticklers have when things have annoyed us (“It was in 1987, I’ll never forget, and it said “CREAM TEA’S”); and also to the justifiable despair of the well educated in a dismally illiterate world. Reading the letters, I was alternately thrilled that so many people had bothered to write and sunk low by such overwhelming evidence of Britain’s stupidity and indifference. The vast majority of letters concerned misplaced apostrophes, of course, in potato’s and lemon’s. But it was interesting, once I started toanalyse and sort the examples, to discover that the greengrocer’s apostrophe formed just one depressing category of the overall, total, mind-bogglingly depressing misuse of the apostrophe. Virtually every proper application of this humble mark utterly stumps the people who write to us officially, who paint signs, or who sell us fruit and veg. The following is just a tiny selection of the examples I received:

Singular possessive instead of simple plural (the “greengrocer’s apostrophe”):

Singular possessive instead of plural possessive:

Plural possessive instead of singular possessive:

No possessive where possessive is required:

Dangling expectations caused by incorrect pluralisation:

and best of all:

Unintentional sense from unmarked possessive:

Someone knows an apostrophe is required … but where, oh where?

Apostrophes put in place names/proper names:

It’s or Its’ instead of Its:

Hundreds of examples, many from respectable National Trust properties and big corporations, but notably:

Plain illiteracy:

Commas instead of apostrophes:

Signs that have given up trying:

This is a mere sample of the total I received. I heard from people whose work colleagues used commas instead of apostrophes; from someone rather thoughtfully recommending a restaurant called l’Apostrophe in Reims (address on request); and from a Somerset man who had cringed regularly at a sign on a market garden until he discovered that its proprietor’s name was – you couldn’t make it up – R. Carrott. This explained why the sign said “Carrott’s” at the top, you see, but then listed other vegetables and fruits spelled and punctuated perfectly correctly.

Up to now, we have looked at the right and wrong uses of the apostrophe, and I have felt on pretty safe ground. All this is about to change, however, because there are areas of apostrophe use that are not so simple, and we must now follow the apostrophe as it flits innocently into murky tunnels of style, usage and (oh no!) acceptable exception. Take the possessive of proper names ending in “s” – such as my own. Is this properly “Lynne Truss’ book” or “Lynne Truss’s book”? One correspondent (whose name I have changed) wrote with a tone of impatience: “From an early age I knew that if I wanted to write Philippa Jones’ book I did NOT WRITE Philippa Jones’s book with a second ‘s’. I see this error often even on a school minibus: St James’s School. Perhaps the rules have changed or the teachers just do not know nowadays.”

Sadly, this correspondent has been caught in the embarrassing position of barking up two wrong trees at the same time; but only because tastes have changed in the matter. Current guides to punctuation (including that ultimate authority, Fowler’s Modern English Usage) state that withmodern names ending in “s” (including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final “s”), the “s” is required after the apostrophe:

With names from the ancient world, it is not:

If the name ends in an “iz” sound, an exception is made:

And an exception is always made for Jesus:

However, these are matters of style and preference that are definitely not set in stone, and it’s a good idea not to get fixated about them. Bill Walsh’s charmingly titled book Lapsing into a Comma (Walsh is a copy desk chief at The Washington Post) explains that while many American newspapers prefer “Connors’ forehand”, his own preference is for “Connors’s forehand” – “and I’m happy to be working for a newspaper that feels the same way I do”. Consulting a dozen or so recently published punctuation guides, I can report that they contain minor disagreements on virtually all aspects of the above and that their only genuine consistency is in using Keats’s poems as the prime example. Strange, but true. They just can’t leave Keats alone. “It is Keats’ poems (NOTKeats’s),” they thunder. Or alternatively: “It is Keats’s poems (NOT Keats’).” Well, poor old Keats, you can’t help thinking. No wonder he developed that cough.

Having said that there are no absolute rights and wrongs in this matter, however, when many people wrote to ask why St Thomas’ Hospital in London has no “s” after the apostrophe, I did feel that the answer must echo Dr Johnson’s when asked to explain his erroneous definition of a pastern: “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.” Of course it should be St Thomas’s Hospital. Of course it should. The trouble is that institutions, towns, colleges, families, companies and brands have authority over their own spelling and punctuation (which is often historic), and there is absolutely nothing we can do except raise an eyebrow and make a mental note. Virtually the first things a British newspaper sub-editor learns are that Lloyds TSB (the bank) has no apostrophe, unlike Lloyd’s of London (insurance); Earls Court, Gerrards Cross and St Andrews have no apostrophe (although Earl’s Court tube station seems to have acquired one); HarperCollins has no space; Bowes Lyon has no hyphen; and you have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors, reminding you that these are brand names. The satirical magazine Private Eye once printed one of the letters from Biro’s representatives, incidentally, under the memorable heading, “What a pathetic way to make a living”.

St Thomas’ Hospital is thus the self-styled name of the hospital and that’s that. The stadium of Newcastle United FC is, similarly, St James’ Park. In the end, neither example is worth getting worked up about – in fact, on the contrary, once you have taken a few deep breaths, you may find it within you not only to tolerate these exceptions but positively to treasure them and even love them. Person-ally, I now lose all power of speech if I see University College London ignorantly awarded a comma where none belongs, or E. M. Forster’s title Howards End made to look ordinary by some itchy-fingered proofreader. Meanwhile, The Times Guide to English Style and Usage (1999) sensibly advises itsreaders not to pin their mental well-being on such matters, putting it beautifully: “Beware of organisations that have apostrophe variations as their house style, eg, St Thomas’ Hospital, where we must respect their whim.”

It is time to confess that I have for many years struggled with one of the lesser rules of the apostrophe. I refer to the “double possessive”, which is evidently a perfectly respectable grammatical construction, but simply jars with me, and perhaps always will. We see it all the time in news-papers:

Well, pass me the oxygen, Elton, and for heaven’s sake, stop banging on about your glitzy mates for a minute while I think. A friend of the footballer’s? Why isn’t it, “a friend of the footballer”? Doesn’t the construction “of the” do away with the need for another possessive? I mean to say, why do those sweet little Beckhams need to possess Elton John twice? Or is that a silly question?

But fight the mounting panic and turn to Robert Burchfield’s third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1998), and what do I find? The double possessive is calmly explained, and I start to peel away the problem. Do I have any objection to the construction “a friend of mine” or “a friend of yours”? Well, no. I would never say “a friend of me” or “a friend of you”. And yes, you would say “a cousin of my mother’s”, “a child of hers”. Well, “a friend of the footballer’s” is the same thing! The only time you drop the double possessive is when, instead of being involved with an animate being, you are “a lover of the British Museum”, because obviously the British Museum does not – and never can – love you back.

We may all be getting a little sick and tired of the apostrophe by now, so I’ll just get a couple more things off my chest.

1 Someone wrote to say that my use of “one’s” waswrong (“a common error”), and that it should be ones. This is such rubbish that I refuse to argue aboutit. Go and tell Virginia Woolf it should be A Room of Ones Own and see how far you get.

2 To reiterate, if you can replace the word with “it is” or “it has”, then the word is it’s:

If you can replace the word with “who is” or “who has”, then the word is who’s:

If you can replace the word with “they are”, then the word is they’re:

And if you can replace the word with “there is”, the word is there’s:

If you can replace the word with “you are”, then the word is you’re:

We may curse our bad luck that it’s sounds like its; who’s sounds like whose; they’re sounds like their (and there);there’s sounds like theirs; and you’re sounds like your. But if we are grown-ups who have been through full-time education, we have no excuse for muddling them up.

In Beachcomber’s hilarious columns about the Apostropher Royal in The Express, a certain perversely comforting law is often reiterated: the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: “For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an its.” Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall.

The only illiteracy with apostrophes that stirs any sympathy in me is the greengrocer’s variety. First, because greengrocers are self-evidently horny-thumbed people who do not live by words. And second, because I agree with them that something rather troubling and unsatisfactory happens to words ending in vowels when you just plonk an “s” on the end. Take the word “bananas”: at first glance, you might suppose that the last syllable is pronounced “ass”. How can the word “banana” keep its pronunciation when pluralised? Well, you could stick an apostrophe before the “s”! Obviously there is no excuse for not knowing “potatoes” is the plural of “potato”, but if you were just to put an “s” after it, the impulse to separate it from the “o” with some mark or other would be pretty compelling, because “potatos” would be pronounced, surely, “pot-at-oss”.

Moreover, what many people don’t know, as they fulminate against ignorant greengrocers, is that until the 19th century this was one of the legitimate uses of the apostrophe: to separate a plural “s” from a foreign word ending in a vowel, and thus prevent confusion about pronunciation. Thus, you would see in an 18th-century text folio’s or quarto’s – and it looks rather elegant. I just wish a different mark had been employed (or even invented) for the purpose, to take the strain off our long-suffering little friend; and I hear, in fact, that there are moves afoot among certain punctuation visionaries to revive the practice using the tilde (the Spanish accent we all have on our keyboards which looks like this: ˜). Thus: quarto˜s and folio˜s, not to mention logo˜s, pasta˜s, ouzo˜s and banana˜s. For the time being, however, the guardians of usage frown very deeply on anyone writing “quarto’s”. As Professor Loreto Todd tartly remarks in her excellent Cassell’s Guide to Punctuation (1995), “This usage was correct once, just as it was once considered correct to drink tea from a saucer.”

It would be nice if one day the number of apostrophes properly placed in it’s equalled exactly the number of apostrophes properly omitted from its, instead of the other way round. In the meantime, what can be done by those of us sickened by the state of apostrophe abuse? First, we must refute the label “dinosaurs” (I really hate that). And second, we must take up arms. Here are the weapons required in the apostrophe war (stop when you start to feel uncomfortable):

correction fluid

big pens

stickers cut in a variety of sizes, both plain (for sticking over unwanted apostrophes)

and coloured (for inserting where apostrophes are needed)

tin of paint with big brush

guerrilla-style clothing

strong medication for personality disorder

loudhailer

gun

Evidently there used to be a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come in to complain, and he would then talk them into buying something. Well, he would be ill-advised to repeat this ploy once my punctuation vigilantes are on the loose. We lovers of the apostrophe will not stand by and let it be abolished – not because we are dinosaurs who drink tea out of saucers (interesting image) but because we appreciate the way the apostrophe has for centuries graced our words and illuminated our meaning. It is no fault of the apostrophe that some of our words need so much help identifying themselves. Indeed, it is to the credit of the apostrophe that it can manage the task. Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended. The next day after the abolition of the apostrophe, imagine the scene. Triumphant abolitionist sits down to write, “Goodbye to the Apostrophe: we’re not missing you a bit!” and finds that he can’t. Abolish the apostrophe and it will be necessary, before the hour is up, to reinvent it.