apostrophe

The apostrophe is a useful mark in denoting possession and distinguishing the genitive singular and plural. The genitive is generally formed by adding an apostrophe and the letter 's' to the noun. For singular noun, the apostrophe precedes the 's' (as in the author's book). For a plural noun that ends in s, the apostrophe comes after it (as in the politicians' debate). For a plural noun that does not end i 's', you add an apostrophe followed by an 's' (as in the 'people's demands'). Possessive pronouns can function as either adjectives or nouns. The possessive adjectives are 'my, your his, her, our' and 'their.' The possessives 'yours, hers, ours,' and 'theirs' do not take apostrophes.

The apostrophe is also useful in indicating an elision in a contracted word, such as 'don't' or 'haven't' (Though not everyone agrees. Shaw dispenses with it in early editions of his plays, only to find that actors stumbled over the pronunciations of 'we'd' when spelt as wed, or 'can't' when spelt as cant.)


Those are the conventions. Every so often there's a manufactured controversy in publiv life when sticklers discover loose or non-existent observance of the apostrophe. There's even something called the Apostrophe Protection Society that reliably kicks up a kerfuffle about street signs that omit the apostrophe. When it belatedly discovered that the famous Princes Street in Edignburgh had, till the 1820s, been known as Prince's Street, it doltishly demanded that he street's 'lazy, ignorant and appalling' signs be altered to that previous name.

The genitive (or possessive) apostrophe is a grammatical anomaly in English and its conventions are quite a recent development the apostrophe entered the language (the form of it that we now all Early Modern English) from French in the sixteenth century, as a printer's mark to denote an elision. Its use to denote possession was, for centuries thereafter, must debated and highly inconsistent. ~ Page 131