Hands off my possessive case
THE time has come. I’ve been avoiding dealing with it, but it can be ignored no longer. The apostrophe. That poor wee wormlike punctuation mark that lies curled and helpless, unable to defend itself as it is clubbed senseless. It might be nothing more than a comma with ideas above its station, but that’s no reason to treat it the way we do. It is either denied its rightful heritage or, more frequently, flung into the wrong place, where it quivers like the accusing finger of an unjustly hanged convict.
You might think I’m exaggerating. (By the way, there is no such word as “over-exaggerating”, even though it pops up all over the place like a suppurating boil. To exaggerate is to blow something out of proportion. If you overblew it, it would explode.) I’m not. Nothing touches the heart of a word protector more than the misuse of the apostrophe. Especially a word protector who loves Italian food — I’ve seen hard men cry at the sight of “pizza’s” on a menu.
Apostrophe comes from the Greek apostrophos — “turning away” — a word used when a speaker interrupted himself and turned away from his audience to ask for a glass of retsina. It was also, and still is, the name for a mark indicating an omitted letter. According to the online dictionary of etymology, this maligned mark began to be used in English in the 1580s.
Whether the Greeks abused the apostrophe as much as we do in English is not recorded.
To go back to the beginning, if Id really been avoiding it, I wouldve said Ive been avoiding it. There are three words in that sentence where an apostrophe should have been inserted in place of the missing “ha”.
If tweeters were on speaking terms with the apostrophe, they could signal amusement by typing ’ ’ ’ instead of “ha ha ha”. Except the apostrophe can also stand in for other things, including “no” (as in can’t), so I suppose ’ ’ ’ could also mean “no no no”.
If you asked someone out on a date via text message and received the reply ’ ’ ’, the answer should be clear either way, but those wedded to smiley icons might think you were batting your eyelashes. (“Icon”, incidentally, is another abused and overused word, but since it originally referred to a religious painting or statue, perhaps those yellow faces, symbols of the church of mobile communication, deserve to wear it.)
The apostrophe’s second use is to denote possession (except in the case of its). It’s used for the dog’s bollocks — or, in the case of many dogs, the dogs’ bollocks. The plural of pizza is pizzas — it should really be pizze, but even the calzone has folded and been colonised, so we may as well apply English rules. If, however, you want to tell someone what your pizza has on it, you could say, “the pizza’s topping is artichoke and smoked hedgehog”.
Some say we should be free and easy with language and that the rules governing the apostrophe are far too complex to bother with when we have more important things to worry about. I say no no no. Or, if you like, ’ ’ ’.