{ aaaarrrrgh! }
Mar. 30th, 2006 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
delgaThis is what people have driven me to. Three times in three consecutive posts? NOT FUCKING ON. So this is how you use an apostrophe. FUCKING PAY ATTENTION.
The Apostrophe
’
The apostrophe tells you one of two things:
That letters are missing
That something belongs to something else
1) When letters are missing from a word because two or more have been brought together, we use an apostrophe.
For example: don’t = do + not
Here, the apostrophe tells us that the second “o” has disappeared from the way we say the word. Nt is not a word; n’t actually is a word, even if we don’t use it anymore.
Sometimes an apostrophe indicates that words are missing from a phrase but that doesn’t happen so much:
For example: six o’ clock = six of the clock.
So an apostrophe? Most likely means that a letter has been taken out from the word.
2) When someone owns something else, an apostrophe tells us this. (This is actually a continuation of the ‘letters missing’ rule because possessives in Old and Middle English were denoted, at times, by ‘es’ but that’s pronounced differently so they just dropped the ‘e’ and, well, we don’t use it at all anymore. But that’s a geek out for another day).
OK, so, Jack owns a gun. The gun belongs to Jack. The gun, therefore, is Jack’s gun.
What if lots of people own something? Or lots of people own lots of things? Like…loads of people own a ball. The ball belongs to those people. Argh? No. It’s easy. You just add an apostrophe S to the end of the word owning the ball: the people’s ball.
Let’s make this super easy: use the rule of thumb. Cover up the apostrophe and anything that comes after it with your thumb and that way you’ll know who is owning whatever.
OK, this is where it gets confusing for people. The new rule is that you just add ‘s to anything that owns anything else but I personally think this is dumb standardisation. The apostrophe? REALLY EASY TO USE. If there is already an s at the end of a word? Just add an apostrophe. There is no need for an apostrophe sandwich. All that s’s crap is unnecessary. So, loads of boys own a ball? The ball is the boys’ ball. (Why oh why would it be the boys’s ball? Boyses? No).
[OK, I feel I should explain the rule that’s taught in school because people are – annoyingly – using it. Whenever something belongs to something else, add ‘s to it. So Kate has a cat? Kate’s cat. James has a boat? James’s boat. The Montagues have a grudge against the Capulets? The Monatagues’s grudge. I hate this rule because it is clumsy. If you use the rule of thumb, anyone can tell that The Montagues’ grudge is one held by many Montagues. That whole s’s stuff hurts mine eyes.]
Want to know if the ball belongs to one boy or many boys? USE THE RULE OF THUMB. Cover up the apostrophe and everything that comes after it.
a) The girl’s dog.
b) The girls’ dog.
In the first example, if you cover up the apostrophe and what comes after it, you’re left with “girl”. Ball belongs to ONE girl. In the second case? You’re left with “girls”. Ball belongs to MANY girls. SEE? IT’S EASY!
Its/it’s
OK, this is a special rule. For its/it’s, you ONLY use an apostrophe if the word is supposed to be it is. It’s means it is. That is all. It doesn’t mean that something belongs to It, whoever the hell “It” is.
I leave you with some words of wisdom I found on some awesome icon that is floating around eljay:
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Date: 2006-03-30 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 02:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 03:43 am (UTC)Now I'm a bit confused. Is the new rule that you can add an s after the apostrophe in every case? Because yo, that makes absolutely no sense. Take ghosts' - makes sense. Ghosts's? No, no.
And also, okay, I can perhaps accept that in some dialect, you do say boyzes. Dialects are different and in dialect/slang and speech in general, you can get away with a lot of stuff. But boyzes is not a very common things I imagine. And you know, spoken language and written language are different things. Take my dialect in Finnish as an example: there's this phrase that means "definitely/without a doubt/of course", and I say it "ilimammuuta". But if I wrote it like that? People would think I'm batshit crazy (just look at it! awful). No, no - it's written "ilman muuta". No exceptions, and the fact that I say it like that is not an excuse. Written language has stricter rules than spoken language because it's more permanent and we perceive it more closely and also because it's the standard upon which we build. I mean, if we just wrote things however we please, especially in languages such as English were pronounciation may differ quite a lot depending on geographical region, no one would be able to make any sense of one another.
...Okay, I'm not sure if any of that just made sense, so I think I'll go make myself some toast now. *runs off*
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Date: 2006-04-01 03:04 am (UTC)I was taught grammar in Primary school and I learned very well but it wasn't instilled into us. I was a Grammar Geek from a young age so maybe I took it on board more than other people. When I went to secondary school, my first three years of English schooling were done by old-school grammarians. Mrs. Dowse taught me "the rule of thumb" (which is very cute, don't you think?) and Mr. Lee taught me to revere the semicolon and colon, as well as how not to abuse the comma. So my education is very, very English which is to be expected from the school that I went to. But it really depended on the teachers you had; if I'd had one of the newer teachers, I would have been taught to use the Oxford comma. as it is, Mr Lee hated the idea of putting a conjunction with a separator (, and) so I hate it too. I admit, though, that you have to use it sometimes because teh whole poitn of grammar is clarification. And my writing needs a lot of clarification.
Dialects have different words, not necessarily different pronunciations. I;m still nto sure about "boyzes" but we'll go with it for now. I'll admit, if it's ghosts, I'll say it the way you usually say it. If it's ghosts' and I'm reading it out loud? I'll put emphasis on the sibillant sound so that it's a harsher 'sts' sound, merely for clarification. James/James'/Jameses' is a different thing all together mostly because it has that "es" ending which is an exception.
I can see the reason you'd need a standardisation of grammatical rules, especially with English where the rules are harem-scarem anyway. But I think pansying to things like "s's" is counterproductive. I mean, as we've been saying, how do you even pronounce that? And why would you? I can see that in the case of James's, the extra 's' has a place to be pronounced but in boys'? The apostrophe just tells you that there are lots of boys in possession of whatever. It's for written clarification. "s's" is not written clarification, it's pandering childishness to people who are fully capable of learning the correct rules; it's babying them through a language that they already know. And if people just took a freaking minute to pay attention to what they were writing, it would ave so much hassle. But people are just damn lazy and that's where all the hassle comes in. They just can't be bothered and it pisses me off.
Ahem.
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Date: 2006-04-01 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-01 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 11:56 am (UTC)No, I saw three posts in a single comm. It sent me batty. *hugs* Wasn't you :)
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Date: 2006-03-30 11:10 pm (UTC)Another t-shirt in the making, I think.
Brilliant post - thank you!
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Date: 2006-03-31 02:43 am (UTC)Ah, this was a "M schools the world" post. I have a mind to link people to this post every time I see apostrophe abuse occuring.