McWhorter - Lets Chill Out About Apostrophes
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Apostrophes arent all theyre cracked up to be.
By John McWhorter
The North Yorkshire Council in England has been in the hot seat recently for its changes to street signs — not because of anything on them, but rather because of something left off. One street in the town of Harrogate was rendered as St. Marys Walk. No apostrophe. Outrage ensued.
The problem, punctilious observers argued, was that the nearby church is and always will be St. Mary’s — with an apostrophe, thank you very much — and leaving that bit of punctuation out of the name of the road obscures that vital and historical connection. Plus it’s just plain ignorant.
St. Marys Walk was just the beginning. It turns out the county plans to phase out apostrophes on all street signs, in part “to prevent complications while searching on databases,” an official told my Times colleague Jenny Gross.
The intensity of the debate may seem surprising. How many people would really miss the connection between St. Marys Walk and St. Mary’s Church? Language lives in, and on, context, and the context here is unmistakable. The truth is, apostrophes in general don’t make our language much clearer. We could really do without most of them.
Their deployment is governed by some rather fine rules — is it “my uncle’s book” or “my uncles’ book”? “It’s” or “its”? — that take a bit of effort to master. As such, their proper use conveys precision but also something else, something harder to put one’s finger on. I admit that seeing anyone over the age of 15 use its instead of it’s, or your instead of you’re, makes me wince a little. But it shouldn’t.
English seemed to get along just fine without apostrophes until the 1500s. Chaucer wouldn’t have known one if it bit him. The first edition of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost” had it as “Loues Labors Loſt” (also, life went on with u standing for both u and v). Of course, no one was missing electricity, microchips or “Family Guy” episodes either, despite how useful they would have been.
Using an apostrophe to indicate something missing — like the “i” that gets lost when “it is” becomes “it’s” — serves only as a kind of formulaic salute to an earlier phase of the language. Consider “Bill’s in the room.” The apostrophe is there to let you know we’re talking about a man called Bill rather than a wad of paper money. But even without the apostrophe, context would instantly make the meaning clear. Is it a story about a fervent search for bank notes? “There’s my book,” I write — though there is no such thing as “theres” to distinguish the word from, except perhaps in a poem.
And then we have the counsel from some quarters to use an apostrophe alone to indicate possession in nouns that end in “s” — “the boss’ problem” — which gives readers no visual clue that you pronounce it “boss-es,” a problem in a language where the relationship between spelling and sound is already so grievously fraught.
Finally, the way the apostrophe forces a distinction between “it’s” and “its,” and “you’re” and “your,” is just as decorative. “Its a rainy day” does not leave us scratching our chins over why a rainy day might belongs to an it. “Its your birthday — your 17!” may look barbaric to our eyes, but thanks to context it occasions no loss of clarity. No one would seriously think the reference was to someone possessing the number 17. Surely if we can deal with rabbits running fast and chairs stuck fast to the floor, or to seeding a watermelon and seeding a field, we could deal with its and your having two meanings.
I’m not suggesting we eliminate the apostrophe, but I would rather retain it for cases where there is a genuine possibility of ambiguity. A sign near dumpsters that says “Residents refuse to be placed in bins” could — theoretically — be interpreted as referring to people’s unwillingness to be placed in the trash. “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is another example, as it is genuinely unclear without an apostrophe whether we’re talking about “labors” in the plural or a contraction of “labor is.” I envision an alternate universe where the apostrophe would occur in English about as often as the dieresis on words like “naïve” does under some publications’ stylebook rules.
In my experience, any such suggestion that we loosen rules around punctuation elicits not just disagreement but near fury.
Some years ago I wrote something skeptical about the Oxford comma and it caused a whole kerfuffle, with endless accusations that I was the Professor Who Wants to Abolish the Comma Entirely. I got interview requests from as far as Europe.
But no. For one thing, language always changes, and I sense that the American public has opened up to this considerably over the past 20 years or so as technology has allowed public linguists to get the word out beyond the medium of the book. Still, even people who are comfortable with the idea that words evolve may not realize that punctuation does, too. Writing does not entail immutable rules in the way that mathematics does.
Not so long ago, it was common to capitalize nouns for rhetorical purpose: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Donald Trump’s penchant for this — “Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue” — would have seemed almost elegant 200 years ago (even though blue isn’t a noun in this instance). Now, we restrict the capital letter to proper nouns and the start of sentences. The world has kept spinning — and would continue to do so if we stopped using capital letters entirely.
So why does the issue of apostrophes elicit rage? Using them (or not) is a simple procedural matter. Would people take umbrage if a chef suggested loosening the rules of a recipe? “How dare you suggest it isn’t necessary to braise the meat before adding other ingredients!”
I suggest that the visceral sentiment in this case is actually a kind of classism — one from which I cannot honestly exempt myself. When we no longer talk (at least overtly) of people marrying “beneath” themselves, when the difference in dress style between the rich and the poor is much less stark than it was in the past, when popular entertainment is no longer considered the province of “the lower orders,” blackboard grammar rules provide one of last permissible ways to look down on others.
This is why it is important to know that in an alternate universe — such as Chaucer’s — apostrophe-free English could be perfectly comprehensible and eminently legitimate. We should resist a sense that people who never quite master “it’s” and “you’re” are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. The rule they are having trouble with is one that was never really necessary anyway.
We aren’t going to stop using apostrophes. But it would help to understand that we could, with no harm to anyone.
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