Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [20]
If you can replace the word with “you are”, then the word is you’re:
You’re never going to forget the difference between “its” and “it’s”.
We may curse our bad luck that it’s sounds like its; who’s sounds like whose; they’re sounds like their (and there); there’s sounds like theirs; and you’re sounds like your. But if we are grown-ups who have been through full-time education, we have no excuse for muddling them up.
This chapter is nearing its end.
Whose book is this, again?
Some of their suggestions were outrageous!
This is no concern of theirs!
Your friend Elton John has been talking about you again.
In Beachcomber’s hilarious columns about the Apostropher Royal in The Express, a certain perversely comforting law is often reiterated: the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: “For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an its.” Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall.
The only illiteracy with apostrophes that stirs any sympathy in me is the greengrocer’s variety. First, because greengrocers are self-evidently horny-thumbed people who do not live by words. And second, because I agree with them that something rather troubling and unsatisfactory happens to words ending in vowels when you just plonk an “s” on the end. Take the word “bananas”: at first glance, you might suppose that the last syllable is pronounced “ass”. How can the word “banana” keep its pronunciation when pluralised? Well, you could stick an apostrophe before the “s”! Obviously there is no excuse for not knowing “potatoes” is the plural of “potato”, but if you were just to put an “s” after it, the impulse to separate it from the “o” with some mark or other would be pretty compelling, because “potatos” would be pronounced, surely, “pot-at-oss”.
Moreover, what many people don’t know, as they fulminate against ignorant greengrocers, is that until the 19th century this was one of the legitimate uses of the apostrophe: to separate a plural “s” from a foreign word ending in a vowel, and thus prevent confusion about pronunciation. Thus, you would see in an 18th-century text folio’s or quarto’s – and it looks rather elegant. I just wish a different mark had been employed (or even invented) for the purpose, to take the strain off our long-suffering little friend; and I hear, in fact, that there are moves afoot among certain punctuation visionaries to revive the practice using the tilde (the Spanish accent we all have on our keyboards which looks like this: ˜). Thus: quarto˜s and folio˜s, not to mention logo˜s, pasta˜s, ouzo˜s and banana˜s. For the time being, however, the guardians of usage frown very deeply on anyone writing “quarto’s”. As Professor Loreto Todd tartly remarks in her excellent Cassell’s Guide to Punctuation (1995), “This usage was correct once, just as it was once considered correct to drink tea from a saucer.”
It would be nice if one day the number of apostrophes properly placed in it’s equalled exactly the number of apostrophes properly omitted from its, instead of the other way round. In the meantime, what can be done by those of us sickened by the state of apostrophe abuse? First, we must refute the label “dinosaurs” (I really hate that). And second, we must take up arms. Here are the weapons required in the apostrophe war (stop when you start to feel uncomfortable):
correction fluid
big pens
stickers cut in a variety of sizes, both plain (for sticking over unwanted apostrophes)
and coloured (for inserting where apostrophes are needed)
tin of paint with big brush
guerrilla-style clothing
strong medication for personality disorder
loudhailer
gun
Evidently there used to be a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come in to complain, and he would then talk them