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Weâve all seen it and cringed: The sign advertising âAntiqueâs for Sale,â the one in the supermarket boasting about itâs âfresh cucumberâs,â or the sign on the neighborâs house saying âWelcome to the Smithâs.â Few among us (or so we hope) donât know that those are wrong.
Yet its showing up everywhere, even in âeditedâ copy. Can anyone explain it? Perhaps thereâs a bad grammar textbook somewhere, or one teacher incorrectly taught thirty students, who taught thirty more âŚ
The phenomenon is sometimes called âthe grocerâs apostrophe,â because it seems most prevalent at the grocery store, though itâs spreading faster than the swine flu. The disease seems to particularly affect words ending in vowels. Nonetheless, lets try to stamp this out. Tell a friend, and ask that friend to tell a friend: Apostropheâs are not used to form plurals.
Except, of course, when they are.
Yes, there are a few rare cases when an apostrophe is used to form plurals. For example, an apostrophe is needed in the plural of a single letter or number, as in âmind your pâs and qâsâ or âdigital binary code uses only 0âs and 1âs.â Without the apostrophe, it would be almost impossible to read âps and qsâ or â0s and 1s.â The plurals of acronyms and initialisms sometimes take apostrophes (as in CDâs), but that use varies by style. And, again depending on style, apostrophes may be used to form plurals of numbers (her salary was in the low 100âs), or so-called âwords as wordâsâ expressions (there can be no ifâs, andâs, or butâs about it).
Apostrophes are primarily used to indicate possession (Sharonâs book) or to indicate omission, as in a contraction, where the apostrophe replaces letters (I canât ever remember the difference between its and itâs). Apostrophes may also be used, depending on style, to indicate the contraction of a number: â2009â becomes ââ09.â In fact, since the possessive apostrophe is really replacing the word âofâ (the book of Sharon), youâll rarely go wrong if you remember that an apostrophe almost always indicates that something has been dropped.
If you remember that last sentence, youâll also never have the âitâs/itsâ problem, which is also endemic. If you canât replace âitâsâ with âit is,â your âitâsâ is a possessive personal pronoun and should be âits.â And thatâs probably the crux of much apostrophe confusion, since possessive personal pronounsâmine, yours, his, hers, theirsâare just about the only possessives that donât take apostrophes.
One more little apostrophic quirk: Because the possessive apostrophe effectively replaces âof,â you need one in such phrases as âI could use two weeksâ restâ (two weeks of rest) or âhe was sentenced to twenty yearsâ imprisonmentâ (twenty years of imprisonment). But youâd never say âsheâs six months of pregnant,â so you donât want an apostrophe in the phrase âsheâs six months pregnant.â
Now that you know it all, how many apostrophe errors did you spot in this column?*
* There are five intentional apostrophe errors, not counting the examples of erroneous use. (Write languagecorner@cjr.org if you need a key.) If you counted âgrocerâs apostrophe,â make it six, because youâre assuming âgrocersâ is an adjective, not a noun, the way âteachers unionâ doesnât need an apostropheâbut thatâs another column.
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