Thereby Hangs an Apostrophe

by Karen Mathieson

What does “Hamlet” have in common with a farmers’ market? It’s full of apostrophes!

Hamlet Turns to Yorick

Shakespeare knew that having his melancholy Dane address someone not really there – his father’s ghost, for instance, or the skull of the jester Yorick – would reveal inward torture better than your average conversation. Classic Greek rhetoric used that trick first, and gave it a name meaning “to turn away” from an audience: apostrophe.

 By Shakespeare’s time, another sense of apostrophe was probably already producing some tortured moments in English, and the market square in Stratford-upon-Avon may well have sported signs advertising fresh beet’s, onions’ and potato’es by the peck. This speckled state arose when writers first tried to put words in their readers’ ears by way of their readers’ eyes.

 Enter the printing press and you have a single, curved bit of typography representing both missing letters in contractions, as in, “it’s clear he’s losing his mind,” and possession in nouns (if not in relative pronouns), as in “the speech is long, but the thrust of its meaning is that he doubts his mother’s honor.”

 “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” by modern English stickler Lynne Truss offers numerous accounts of catastrophe-by-apostrophe. My job as a simple communications coach – “neither a linguist nor a pundit be,” Polonius might opine –  is to offer practical help for people who just want to be able to figure out whether “i-t-s” should take an apostrophe in a particular case. (Follow the clues in the previous paragraph.)

Click here for a PDF of my skill-building sheet on the everyday apostrophe. Click here for the views of American linguist Gabe Doyle, and here for a clear, scholarly paper on the haunted history of a symbol of confusion.