Reactionary

What’s wrong with the above sentence? If it’s written correctly, then there should be a blank after the last word because the question would be referring to something belonging to an apostrophe (a punctuation mark here personified). But if the apostrophe in the sentence were removed, that changes the meaning of the question entirely. Without the apostrophe, the question becomes the subject of this post. What is with all those apostrophes?

An apostrophe denotes possession such as “apostrophe’s” refers to something belonging to the said apostrophe while “apostrophes” is simply the plural. Why is that so hard to understand? Are people really becoming that stupid? Why are things like this seen everywhere: PC’s, ticket’s, CD’s, etc etc etc. Just add an “s”. It isn’t hard. English isn’t straightforward by any means but the plural is definitely far simpler than something like Italian. Most of the time, it’s just a matter of adding an “s”. An apostrophe means something belongs to the noun being apostrophed or that it’s an abbreviation, hence a letter or two is missing when two words were joined together.

Hence the difference between “your” and “you’re”. “Your” denotes possession: your book, your leather pants. While the apostrophe in “you’re” is taking the place of an “a”. “You’re” is actually a combination of two words, “you” and “are”. Hence, “you’re” = “you are”. Same thing for “its” and “it’s”. It isn’t hard, people.

Now about those perfect tenses…

Posted on January 28th, 2005 under Scholar •  Print •  Email • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed