Afraid of Apostrophes? Fear No More!

I admit it: I’ve always been a grammar geek. In the second grade, I had missed a few days of school for whatever reason. When I came back to the fold, the teacher was going over the proper way to use apostrophes to show possession and told us that there would be a quiz following the recap. Was I not exempt from this quiz because of my absence? No. “It’s easy to learn, Paul.” Okay. I understood the concept of adding an apostrophe-s to words and names, but my young mind could not grasp the s-apostrophe, or plural possessive. I had a mini panic attack. I was a smart kid; why could I not figure this out? I realized that missing a few days of school could change your life and make you a dunce (I vowed never to be sick again). The knot in my stomach tightened, and it felt like the time during recess when Lee Ann Nolan punched me in the gut after I took a cookie from her. I remember taking it from her because I liked her and wanted her to notice me. (I was “straight” back then.) Maybe this is why as a middle-aged adult I don’t like to be noticed too much. (Psychologists, any input?)

Back to the quiz. Because I did not like feeling like a little dummy, I vowed to figure this stuff out ASAP. So, I asked Sheri, the girl next to me, to explain it. (I didn’t want to ask the teacher because I felt she was a little mean that day, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of the entire reading group.) So Sheri told me in a sweet whisper that whenever a word is plural, you just add an apostrophe. Of course I tried to analyze her simple instruction, which made me panic even more when I was confronted with the word “children.” Christ, if I was a child who couldn’t even figure out how to show possession to the word that represented my peers, what kind of a child was I? So I took a deep breath (I knew breath control could make or break you), turned to her again, and she saw me about to cry. Trying to ameliorate my addled temperament, she quickly added, “If the word ends in an s, just add the apostrophe.

Okay, I could grasp that quick and efficient dictum. So, when it was time for the quiz, every time I saw an s, I added the little apostrophe. Phew.

For the remainder of the school day, whenever I had a free moment, I looked at all the examples of possession in my workbook, and finally my brain was able to grasp the concept.

Why am I telling you this tale? Because if a six-year-old can figure out how to use a damn apostrophe in less than four hours, so can you.

If you don’t know this already, the British are notorious for not understanding how to use apostrophes. Lynne Truss wrote extensively about this in her cute book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, excoriating green grocers for adding apostrophes to, well, just about everything. Says Truss, “I don’t know how bad things are in America, but in the UK I cannot emphasize it enough: standards of punctuation are abysmal.” She goes on to list some funny examples of improperly apostrophized signs, my favorite being “XMA’S TREES.” (That one defies logic.)

British author Simon Griffin, a man after my own heart, believes that you can learn the proper way to use apostrophes. He recently wrote a wee book called Fucking Apostrophes. From the get-go, Griffin tries to understand why the British populace cannot understand the difference between its and it’s. (Here’s a little quiz: can you use both properly in the same sentence?)

Says Griffin: “The basic rules of fucking apostrophes are, as you’d expect, quite basic, but as the English language has evolved, so the use of fucking apostrophes has become more and more complex.” (Every time the word “apostrophe” appears, it is preceded by the word “fucking.” Trust me, it works.)

He goes on to state: “The fact is that the rules for using fucking apostrophes have changed massively over time, and different people have adopted different versions. Just look at King’s Cross, which is written both with and without a fucking apostrophe; or Waterstones, which dropped its fucking apostrophe; or Hear’Say, who used a fucking apostrophe to make them look groovy.” (This reminds of the time when Barney’s dropped its apostrophe because Ivan Chermayeff, its adman, thought it would look better in its logo, hovering above “New York.” It does.)

All of these misplaced apostrophes suggest that as English was changing from an oral to a written language, writers and scholars and printers all had different ideas for how to use an apostrophe. As the language progressed, and grammar rules became more rigid, the general literate population became confused. I imagine the frustration of those who truly gave a crap: “When do I add that squiggly, arrogant little bugger?”

Here are a few of my favorite examples from Fucking Apostrophes. They are cheeky, irreverent, and tossed off in a manner so nonchalant that I can’t help but love this man.

• “You’re an idiot = You are an idiot.”
• “He’d like you to buy him some cocaine. = “He would like you to buy him some cocaine.”
• “The children’s wage was low. (Not ‘The childrens/childrens’ wage…’)”

Alas, Mr. Griffin and his editors are not perfect: At the end of the book, we read the following two examples explaining the difference between your and you’re:

• “Your test results are back Mr. Armstrong.”
• “You’re next Mr. Wiggins.”

Can you spot the errors? Someone should write a book called Fucking Commas.

Oh, as we enter the holiday season, please don’t add a fucking apostrophe to your last name on your family’s holiday card. If your last name is Smith, you are not the Smith’s; you are the Smiths. If your last name is Griffiths, you are not the Griffiths’ or the Griffiths’s; you are the Griffithses. Heck, if your last name is Papadopoulos, you are not the Papadopoulos’s; you are the Papadopouloses. Yes, it looks weird, but that’s the way it is. Better right than looking like a fucking—well, you get it.

Have you thought of a sentence using it’s/its? Here’s my example: It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and its celebrants can’t wait for the holiday season to be over. 

The Closing Quotation Mark Dilemma

Three simple rules to keep your punctuation marks in their right place

My biggest punctuation pet peeve involves quotation marks. I get very self-righteous and snobby whenever I espy misplaced ones. If you don’t know the first thing about using quotation marks in relation to other punctuation in standard American English, dear reader, read on. These are the three simple rules you must follow.

1. Periods and commas always precede closing, or end, quotation marks.

Examples:

Mary said, “I truly, madly, knee-deeply love you, Joe.” 

Desperately seeking a “bromance,” Jason hung out at the gym hoping that another dude would ask him to join in a game of twenty-one.

2. Semicolons and colons always follow closing quotation marks.

Examples:

She is my sworn “frenemy”; I love her like a sister, but she is constantly throwing shade every time someone tells me I look good.

These movies were featured in Jean’s article “The Three Scariest Movies of All Time”: “The Exorcist,” “Alien,” and “Mommie Dearest.”

3. Question marks and exclamation points precede closing quotation marks only when they are part of the quoted material.

Examples:

Thomas enthused nonstop about Barbara Billingsley’s scene-stealing performance as the Jive Lady in “Airplane!” 

Did you just accuse me of “cockblocking”?

❦   ❦   ❦

It really is that simple, dear reader.

I had a Harvard-educated lawyer tell me that I was wrong, that the comma did not fall before the end quotation mark. I was proofreading his such-and-such agreement and the situation involved a defined term, something like

This agreement (the “Agreement”, and together with . . . .

So, like a good proofreader, I transposed the comma and closing quotation mark that he had wrong. But in his mind, I was wrong. Self-righteously (why do grammar arguments evince so much arrogance?) he claimed that the comma cannot precede the end quotation mark because then, whenever the term Agreement appeared throughout, it would have to carry a comma at the end, like this: Agreement,. I looked at him incredulously. I said, “It is understood that the comma will not have to be attached to the defined term.” I tried to convey the sense that no one in his right mind would expect that to happen. It was less than a week after 9/11 when this conversation occurred, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. All of our minds in New York city were addled then. A collective jumble of criss-crossed circuits and untethered emotion.

I think people sometimes get confused because there exists a British style of quotation mark placement. The rules are the same for American style regarding placement next to question marks, exclamation points, semicolons, and colons, but differ for commas and periods only when the quotation is just a fragment. In these instances, commas and periods follow closing quotation marks. For example:

Hermione looked high and low for her “soul mate”, but, alas, could not find her.

This is called logical quotation. Many Americans insist that they are being logical when they place the comma after the closing quotation mark when it comes to a fragment. If the British do it, why don’t we?

For me, though, placing the closing quotation mark after a comma or period seems logical. I like to tell people that the eye sees the period or comma first and this sends a little trigger to the brain, informing it that the sentence is either ending (if you see a period) or there is more to come (if you see a comma). Your eye then sees that the quotation has ended. To me, this seems “cleaner,” or better for my brain, knowing that this sentence is going to continue before knowing that the quotation ends. Even if it is for a split second. My explanation may seem a little poetically justified. But then again, human beings have the uncanny ability to justify almost anything.

❦   ❦   ❦

A few years go by. I notice that Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged online entry for metonymy contains misplaced quotation marks. What? I can’t believe my eyes. My brain is confused. Anger wells up, my jaw in a furious clench. So, I let M-W know, in terse sanctimony, how my esteem for this hallowed institution has fallen precipitously towards the brink of no return. Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but you can infer my “haha, I got you,” superciliousness.

Your Unabridged dictionary’s definition of “metonymy” has punctuation errors. Commas always occur before the end quotation marks, never after.

For those of you unfamiliar (and presumably myself when I sent the missive), the definition of metonymy on Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged site reads verbatim:

a figure of speech that consists in using the name of one thing for that of something else with which it is associated (as in “spent the evening reading Shakespeare”, “lands belonging to the crown”, “demanded action by City Hall”, “ogling the heavily mascaraed skirt at the next table”)

Two weeks later, a reply came from the Halls of Academe:

Hello, 

Thanks for writing. 

Although most people in the U.S. now place all commas and periods that follow quoted material inside the quotation marks, this was not always the case. For a long time, many writers placed such punctuation marks within quotations only if they were part of the material being quoted. This was the case when our unabridged dictionary, Webster’s Third New International, was being written. We’ve since changed our policy, and when a new edition of our unabridged dictionary is released, commas in definitions like the one at the entry for “metonymy” will be inside the quotation marks. 

Thanks again for taking the time to write. 

Sincerely,
Emily Brewster

Well, that explains my coming across misplaced closing quotation marks in old American books and magazine articles. I’m surprised, though, that I even got a response after my snidely gibed e-mail. But tickled, really. In true geek fashion, I will always love learning, especially the history and rules of grammar.

That letter, though, was almost ten years ago. Oh, Emily. When’s the fourth edition due? My brain won’t be able to relax knowing that the metonymy entry still has misplaced quotation marks.

❦   ❦   ❦

Here are some other helpful tips, guaranteed to relax your taxed brain, when confronted with punctuation confusion:

You do not have to double-up on punctuation. In other words, using the examples above, you wouldn’t add a period after the exclamation point in the “Airplane!” sentence. It would look silly: . . . Jive Lady in “Airplane!.” This holds true for commas as well.

When you read the newspaper, say the New York Times, note the punctuation. Really look at it and see how these rules are applied in print. Do the same when reading a novel, or a magazine article. When you acknowledge the punctuation, it sticks.