Category: Writing

The brilliant Stephen Fry on the balance between rule-following and tiresome pedantry in language use:

I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup. I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. You slip into a suit for an interview and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances – it’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.

Both for people who are new to English and for life-long speakers, one of the most consistently confusing aspects of the language is the apostrophe.

There^†s a pretty straightforward reason for this, I think, and it^†s one that could be addressed fairly easily if people are willing to consider a minor linguistic change. There are two main uses for the apostrophe:

• Indicating possession, as in: “The cat’s bed is beside the dog’s bed, on the floor between Carol’s bed and Peter’s bed” and
• Indicating a contraction, as in: “I’ve noticed there’s not a lot of time ’til Christmas”

This dual use is most problematic insofar as it causes it’s/its errors. People are naturally used to seeing the apostrophe as a marker for possession, so “The dog is vexed by it’s fleas” seems intuitive.

A simple solution would be to use two different marks for the two different purposes. Since possession seems to be the use that is most intuitive for people, I would suggest using the new mark for contractions. A superscript dagger wouldn^†t change the look of printed text too much. Furthermore, the character is already included in nearly all typefaces, and isn^†t widely used for any purpose that isn^†t equally well served by a numbered footnote. People who chose to make the change wouldn^†t confuse people excessively, and English’s reputation as an incoherent hodgepodge of a language might be somewhat mitigated.

The problems with apostrophes also connect to the awkward issues involved in indicating plurality and possession for words the always end in ‘s’, over which there is no agreement even among pedantic language experts. Using two punctuation marks wouldn^†t settle that, but it may help reduce the odds of error.