It's its: Understanding the rules of apostrophes, and the exceptions
Updated
Copywriter Simon Griffin thought he knew the rules of apostrophes, until he tried to explain them and discovered there are exceptions to every rule.
Like many people, Mr Griffin was becoming increasingly frustrated by the apostrophe mistakes he was seeing at work and on social media.
"I was working with some designers and one or two of them would remove apostrophes from headlines because they didn't look nice, so I explained that if they removed an apostrophe it changed the meaning of the words," he told Gillian O'Shaughnessy on 720 ABC Perth.
"[But] the more I tried to explain to them, the more I found myself going in circles. There would always be an exception to every rule I tried to tell them.
"That's when I started to get quite frustrated myself.
"I always thought I understood all the rules, but the more I looked into it the more grey areas appeared."
Irreverent grammar guide
His research culminated in a comic grammar guide, titled F***ing Apostrophes.
"I wrote the book and tried to clarify in my own head as well as everyone else's," he said.
Apostrophes originated in the 1500s with a Frenchman named Geoffroy Tory.
"He was a printer who initially used apostrophes to show omission of certain letters," Mr Griffin said.
"That's where the basic apostrophe rules come from — you're for you are, for example."
Punctuation in an internet age
While the rules for apostrophe use have remained fairly consistent for generations, the English language is constantly evolving — and that is where problems arise.
"Now we have nouns that become adjectives and we use a lot more acronyms these days, like MPs," he said.
"You can't use apostrophes in hashtags or urls so you find a lot of brands are dropping them because it just makes it easier.
"In shops you see signs for women's clothing, and it has to have an apostrophe, but more and more you just see it dropped off."
An exception to every rule
Even a seemingly hard and fast rule like never using an apostrophe to indicate a plural could occasionally be broken, according to Mr Griffin.
"I looked into it and people do," he said.
"If you wanted to write 'dot your i's and cross your t's', then without the apostrophe you might read it as is and ts."
Other terms, like cow's milk, he said were more open to interpretation.
"Does the milk belong to the cow or is it describing the type of milk?" he asked.
"My advice is to choose what your meaning is and then be consistent with that."
Topics: languages, author, human-interest, perth-6000
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