Apostrophes

Apostrophes: their cause and cure


At the top end of Eyre Square in Galway stands a handsome piece of street furniture. It is the Browne Doorway, part of the frontage of a seventeenth-century house. A plaque nearby explains that “the doorway was relocated from it’s original position in Abbeygate Street…”

Aargh! Apostrophe alert! This matter of when to put the apostrophe in its and when to leave it out causes more trouble than it’s worth. The chap in Galway should have left it out. Here’s why.

Basically, apostrophes serve two functions. Like all punctuation and diacritical marks, their purpose is to clarify meaning, not to confuse or obscure it. First, an apostrophe indicates that something is missing. Look at the previous paragraph, where I wrote “more trouble than it’s worth”. What’s missing is the “i” in “is”, just as what is missing in the first word of this sentence is likewise the “i” in “is”. Spell it out: what is. 

If you are writing “it is” or “what is” in these contracted forms, you need the apostrophe. If you are writing anything else at all, leave it out. That is an absolutely waterproof rule. By the by, if you are writing formal business documents, you probably should not be using contracted forms anyway, in which case you need never worry about the wretched apostrophe at all. Just never use it.

You can see where the confusion comes from, however. The second purpose of the apostrophe is to indicate possession. Thus “John’s coat”, Mary’s hat” etc. But even this usage has its remote origins in the fact that something has been omitted. In the case of John’s coat, it is a contraction of “John his coat”, which is how that thought was expressed in fifteenth-century English, as the language was assuming its modern form.

Where English grammar really bowls you a googly is that while the apostrophe sometimes indicates possession, most possessive pronouns don’t take an apostrophe. “Its” is a possessive pronoun: it indicates ownership of something. But because we associate apostrophes with possession, we tend to shove them in where they are not wanted.

It’s best to think of what is missing if you feel an apostrophe coming on, rather than of possession. If our Galway sculptor had realised that there was nothing missing in that “its” – in short, that he wasn’t writing an abbreviated version of “it is”—he would have been ok. Had he thought about it, as you should, he would have realised that it made no sense to sculpt “… from it is original position …” which is what in fact came out.

There is a case for saying that if we allowed the apostrophe in its/it’s to disappear altogether and simply use “its” for all usages, it would save a lot of tears. After all, there are lots of words that can mean different things, even opposite things. Thus “to cleave” can mean to join or to separate: we simply infer the correct meaning from the context. Such words are called auto-antonyms, but you don’t need to remember that.

It’s a seductive argument but an incomplete one because there are some cases where you can’t omit the apostrophe without mangling the meaning of what you have written, which is, after all, what you want to avoid.

Take the phrase “the manager’s assistant’s advice”. The position of the apostrophes indicates that there is one manager and one assistant. But if the manager has two assistants, then it becomes “the manager’s assistants’ advice, the plural possessive coming after the “s” rather than before.

Pesky little chap, the apostrophe, but he has his uses.

FERGAL TOBIN is a retired publisher and the proprietor of WriteProper, a one-morning workshop aimed at improving the written English of staff in businesses, trade associations, professional bodies and the public service. See www.writeproper.ie for more.

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