The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [16]
Benjamin chuckled and pointed at our server’s name tag. Now that I’d gotten him to look out for typos, my former roommate had become hyper-aware of all written words to cross his path. Thus, being served by a man named Victor Hugo was the height of hilarity. In the spirit of our friend’s namesake, I decided to go with the caramel French toast.
Before our drinks arrived, the man who’d seated us returned. He’d taken Benjamin’s inquiry at face value, thinking he must have a son or cousin or some other eligible urchin in his life, so he now dropped off some literature on the weekly Kids’ Night. Or Kid’s Night. Kids Night? Uh-oh. What a magnet for error my companion had turned out to be! So soon after Benjamin had spotted one typo, he’d now been handed another. Every possible rendition of Kids’ had been attempted somewhere on the flyer. Due to someone’s lack of, shall we say, apostrophic confidence, they’d decided to try putting the apostrophe before the s here, and after the s there, and over in that corner we can try it without one. I.e., the kind of approach to punctuation one might expect from that notable pair of flip-flops back home, John Kerry and Mitt Romney.
We weren’t sure, though, which rendition we ourselves would vote for. The more we talked it over, the muddier the question became. They offered a Kid’s Party Package: a single package deal for a singular kid’s birthday party. Or should it be Kids’ Party because there would be plural kids attending? Then again, it could be Kid’s Party, using the archetypal Kid to stand for all kids. Like Mother’s Day, which referred not to a day for all mothers (Mothers’ Day) but the day that you, Vic Hugo, had best scrounge up a carnation or two for your own mother.
We can argue over the logic, but the U.S. lacks an overarching authority or consensus on generic possessives.* So the Mother’s Day argument makes sense in isolation, but the government yanked the apostrophe out of Veterans Day. Let’s not get started with Presidents’ Day … Presidents Day? President’s Day?
I have a confession to make. I don’t care whether you go with Kid’s or Kids’, Presidents or President’s. There isn’t some apostrophe god reclining upon an ancient, pitted throne, clutching one single answer to the conundrum. What’s more essential is that you make a decision and stick with it. Consistency is the key, and unfortunately also the area in which so much signage fails. Some days later, in Charleston, we’d see a store announcing “Phillip’s Shoes” on its awning, while “Phillips Shoes” adorned the building itself. You can’t even make up your mind about the name of your store? Isn’t that kind of an important decision? The Filene’s Basement problems we’d be investigating further after brunch were another telling example of apostrophe confusion. “Mens’ boxed ties” was an easy one to make, arising from someone knowing a basic grammatical rule (plural apostrophes go after the s) that happened to be broken in this particular case (since men is already a plural noun, there’s no need to distinguish between the singular and plural. It’s man’s and men’s). But then another sign had decided to skip the apostrophe altogether, resulting in the MENS department.
Your teachers were right about the apostrophe always standing in for a missing letter or letters. A millennium ago, instead of using an apostrophe and an s for possessives, English used a genitive case that added the suffix–es to the possessing noun (e.g., Benjamines beard, kides night). Within a couple hundred years, that practice fell into disfavor as English became the preserve of the lower classes, after English-speakers got stomped on by French-speaking Normans from across the narrow sea. But we’ll hold off on the edu-tastic voyage through history. Suffice it to say that in the case of possessives, the apostrophe stands for that lost e, from a grammatical convention that no longer exists.
Further maligning the logic of apostrophes is the fact that the possessive nouns often sound the same as the plural noun. Spoken language