APOSTROPHE: A CATASTROPHE WITHOUT FUR

"The apostrophe is like the G-Spot, that erogenous zone we know exists but aren't quite sure where it is or what to do with it."

- Clifford Thurlow

The Pareto's Principle is also called the 80-20 rule or the Law of Vital Few. Basically, it states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, based possibly on Pareto's dicotyledonous study  of peas in his garden. My uncle had tweaked this principle to say that 20% of the people perform 80% of the work in any organisation. This happens in homes also. Usually  the youngest is made to sweat out the most. Amongst us siblings, poor Bunty laboured the most. Similarly, amongst the various workers in the world of the written word whom we shall call punctuation marks, you will come across the apostrophe whose workload has increased the most ever since it came into existence in the 16th century.

Before I move to the next gear, let me pen down what the apostrophe as a punctuation mark is not. It is not a single quotation mark. It is neither the prime symbol ( ´ ) which is used to indicate measurement in feet or arc minutes nor the acute (´) or grave ( `) used to mark accents in words ending with a vowel in many Romanic languages. It originated in manuscript writing as a point with a downwards tail curving clockwise though the typewriters had, for purposes of economising the keyboard, created the neutral apostrophe, and often reduced it to a straight small slash which I quite deprecate. 

It should also not be confused with the apostrophe which is a figure of speech represented  mostly, but not always, by the exclamation "O" where the writer detaches from reality and addresses an imaginary character, as in "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth" ( Julius Caesar Act 3 Scene1) and "Come , you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here"( Macbeth Act 1 Scene 5 ).

Etymologically, apostrophe has a Greek root which meant "the accent of turning away". It was introduced into English by the French, like one third of its words. The credit goes to one Geoffroy Tory, the imprimeur du roi ( printer to the king Francis I ) who put forward this idea in his book Champfleury ( 1529). It was meant to indicate elision or omission of a vowel or a sound. The Bard took a special fancy for this New Kid on the Block and went about with energetic merriment and jouissance  with the apostrophic shear: " 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd"; " Fie on't! O fie!". Shakespeare , of course, could have been prolific in its usage, and appear a bit odd,  because -ed was pronounced as an extra syllable .

Soon the printers, responsible for so much of mayhem in English orthography, plied the  apostrophe with new tasks. Initially they started, in 17th century, with putting it before an s to indicate singular possessive cases ( the girl's dress). On encountering no murmur of protest, a century later, added another one - this time they put it after plural possessives ( the girls' dresses). 

Since the punctuation marks had not formed a trade union, the poor apostrophe was further weighed down with  extra head loads  and inserted to  indicate:

a) time or quantity ( in one week's time or four yards' length) 

b) omission of figures in dates ( the summer of '42),

c) omission of letters for contractions ( we can't go to Jo'burg which was indeed found convenient to omit the difficult- to- spell middle bulk of long words)

d)plurals of letters ( dot the i's and cross the t's),

e)plurals of words ( what are the do's and don't's?)

f) plurals of foreign words ending with a vowel ( quarto's, folio's).

Phew! a whole lot of work , so much so that in a single word fo'c's'le'  ( the nautical term forecastle) there could be three apostrophes while in a single word like bo'sn's( from boatswain's) there are two apostrophes of omission and one of possession! Sometimes I seriously wonder whether  it was the exploitation of the apostrophe which led Marx  to write Das Capital. 

I do not know if it was on account of protest or compassion that two concessions were  made. We don't use the apostrophe to appear in plural of abbreviations ( MPs) or dates (1980s)  anymore

, though the convention still applies in Big Apple. Second,  it is no more considered correct, as it was for sometime in the 17th century, to use it to pluralize foreign words ending with a vowel. Yes, plurals of quarto and folio can no more be written as quarto's and folio's and the mistakes are derisively dubbed  as the Greengrocer's Apostrophe though the writer and journalist Lynn Truss wonders whether we could introduce the tilde ( ~) to write the plurals of such foreign words as folio~s, quarto~s, pasta~s, etc.

Sadly, the poor apostrophe has not only been overworked, it has been abused beyond all bounds of civility. Such has been savagery of its abuse ( and we shall come to the its and it's shortly) that Queen Elizabeth I was constrained, out of embarrassment and disgust in equal measures, to create the post of Apostrophe Royal to stop its misuse after, of all the people, a greengrocer pointed out an error of a misplaced apostrophe in a royal decree. Keith Waterhouse founded the Association for Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe in the Daily Mirror and then Daily Mail to the hearty applause by millions while the British founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society earned a 2001 Ig Nobel Prize for "efforts to protect, promote and differences between plural and possessive". Bill Bryson could not but fulminate in strongest terms when he called the people behind Tesco's advertisements " mens magazines and girls toys" as " linguistic Neanderthals".

Part of the problem arose because style guides differ, conventions sometimes change as one crosses the Atlantic while the exceptions continue to trump the unwary. It is eminently, and sibilantly,  tricky in the use of possessive of proper nouns ending in "s". So just try to figure out why it is Keats's poems but  Jesus' disciples, why it is St James's Square but Archimedes' screw, why it is Alexander Dumas's Three Musketeers but Moses' tablets. Even among American newspapers there has been little unanimity over whether it is  Connors's forehand or Connors' forehand.  Have you ever mused why there is no s after St Thomas' Hospital, why Lloyds TSB ( the bank)  has no apostrophe but  Lloyd's of London ( insurance) has?

You would not say a"friend of me " but " a friend of mine", you would say a "a cousin of my mother's " but still find it odd to say " Sunil Gavasakar, a friend of the  Tendulkars' " and wonder what what was wrong with " Sunil Gavaskar, a friend of Tendulkars " or with " He is a lover of the British Museum's". What is wrong with one's instead of ones even though it is incorrect to write your's? You may apply for three months' leave but cannot say that you are three months' pregnant.Why, despite the move being called " a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy " the use of an apostrophe in its name by the British Group Hear'Say is not technically wrong - after all, nobody exclaims at a novel being called Westward Ho!?

But it is one thing to be confused by lack of unanimity in conventions of usage, but totally another to be blind, defiant, anarchic and hopelessly ridiculous where the rules exist beyond all doubt. Consider the following ( culled from a survey done by Lynn Truss):

Apple's 1/- a pound ( the Greengrocer's Apostrophe or singular possessive instead of simple plural)

Nude Reader's Wives ( intending "Readers' Nude Wives")

Bobs' Motors or Salmans' biceps ( instead of Bob's or Salman's)

Mens Toilet and Citizens Advice Bureau( forgetting the apostrophe after Men and Citizens)

Cyclist's only ( looks a bit incomplete ; intended Cyclists Only and not something of a cyclist's)

New members welcome drink ( gives a totally different meaning by omitting the apostrophe after member)

It need'nt be a pane or Ladie's hairdresser ( no idea where to put the apostrophe )

Dear Mr Steven's or XMA'S TREE ( putting apostrophe in proper nouns)

Your 21 today! ( a few more like this and you'd be left with no hair to pull in disgust)

Antique,s or apple,s ( commas instead of apostrophe)

Customer toilet or author photograph ( these fellows probably never heard about  the apostrophe?)

The list is only illustrative and not exhaustive . People sometimes omit the apostrophe from commonly used names such a St Annes, St Johns. Of course, there are those who would use the apostrophe erroneously with possessive pronouns (/yours/theirs/hers/its/his).  A few have even taken a license, going by the similarity of their sounds,  to confuse between who's and whose, they're and their, their's and theirs and you're and your. The daddy of them all is the mix up of its with it's even when it cannot be read as " it is" or "it has".

The apostrophes have withstood criticism from many.  George Bernard Shaw  hurled a bacterial invective and called them of them  being " uncouth bacilli".Ho  did not use it for spelling cant, hes, shant, wont, etc ( though he did allow in I'm and it's) .Hubert Selby, Jr. used a slash instead for contractions and none for possessives. A greater threat could be from the modern technology driven textese as well as the urge to " be more  versatile with the digital world of URLs and email addresses", the reason which the British bookstore chain Waterstone's had advanced .

But the greatest could yet come from the ignoramuses  and the "Neanderthals"whose activities we have discussed above. On  the Abolitionists, Lynn Truss, who just would not eat apostrophic shoots leavened with the ignoramuses' errors,   says " abolish the apostrophe and it will be necessary, before the hour is up, to reinvent it." Of course we can derive comfort from the peculiarly reassuring Law of Conservation of Apostrophes: "For every apostrophe omitted, from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its".