Now that you’ve read my
tirade against bad writing, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Holy crap, I need to get my act together. Otherwise I’ll have no one to blame but myself if Diesel was to berate me for my incorrect usage of the subjunctive tense.”
Relax, friends. I’m really not a language Nazi. I’m not going to come over to your blog and crap all over it because you don’t know how to use an apostrophe. For one thing, it’s your blog. You can write whatever you want. For another thing, it’s a freaking blog. Nobody cares that much about it. Get over yourself already.
In fact, many of you were kind enough to point out that my own writing is presently imperfect.
Jeff noted that I left out the word
used in one sentence. And Frode remarked:
I don't want to sound rude or something...
Did you write "punctuation mark's" up there?
Good post anyways.
I can't tell you how pleased I am that even someone with absolutely no sense of irony could still enjoy the post.
And that's really my point: "Misuse" of language is okay as long as it doesn't get in the way of what you're trying to communicate. What I was railing about in that post wasn’t so much technically "incorrect" writing as lazy, sloppy writing – especially when that lazy, sloppy writing gets reproduced for hundreds or thousands of people to see. I mean, there’s just no excuse for a housing development to call itself “The Veranda’s.” If you can afford to build 300 houses, you can afford to pay an English major ten bucks an hour to look over your signs. Well, maybe not, in this housing market.
It is understandable, however, that many of you revere me as a sort of godlike figure, and are therefore terrified of displeasing me, lest my wrath rain down upon thee. With that in mind, I have decided to start a new feature, which would be called
Ask Mr. Language Person if that bastard Dave Barry hadn't trademarked that name when I was in junior high.
Feel free to submit your language/writing questions in the comments. I have started things off with what I imagine will be a typically stupid question about the use of apostrophes.
Whats your deal with apostrophe’s? Why do you care so much?The real question here, friend, is “Why do
you care so
little?” The apostrophe, despite having a name that sounds like a Greek temple where goats and virgins (and occasionally virgin goats) were sacrificed to Zeus, is really the humblest of punctuation marks. It has only two goals in life:
1. To stand in for the missing letters in contractions. For example, if you combine the words
do and
not to make
don't, the apostrophe steps in to say, “Sorry,
o isn’t here right now. Would you like me to have
o call you when he gets in?” Of course, if the apostrophe fails to find its proper place and insists on standing somewhere else, say in between
do and
nt, it is summarily shot, falls to the floor and lies there bleeding until someone needs a comma.
2. To mark nouns as possessive. If you want to imply that one thing belongs to another thing (we high-falutin’ language types call these things
nouns), you stick
’s on the end of the first thing. For example,
Diesel’s kickass blog. Now --and here's where things get so fantastically complicated that it will be completely understandable if you give up entirely -- if the owning noun already has an
s on the end of it, you put the apostrophe
after the s, and don't add another s. Wow, I know, right? It's like trigonometry or something.
The apostrophe is NOT used for making words plural. I don't know where you people learned this, but it's WRONG. The ONLY exception to this is if you're pluralizing a single letter or abbreviation. For example,
The Oakland A's. And unless you're the sports columnist for the
Tribune, the Oakland A's are not going to come up enough in your writing for you to get accustomed to using apostrophes in this way. For all I care, they're the Oakland As from now on. Not enough sports teams have an adverb as their mascot anyway, in my opinion.
If you have read and understood this post up to this point, congratulations! You have now mastered basic apostrophe use, and are qualified to work as an elementary school secretary, copy editor for the local newspaper, or United States senator. The next section is for those of you who aspire to the much lower paid position of Professional Writer. Those of you who are not aiming for such a prestigious and poverty-inducing position should stop reading here.
Advanced Apostrophe Use (Not for the Faint of Heart)The history of the apostrophe is a long and sordid one. In olden times, punctuation marks were rare commodities, often being carted thousands of miles across the Mongolian steppes to the medieval monks who worked diligently through the long medieval nights to illuminate manuscripts from antiquity. (Why they didn't illuminate during the daytime, when illumination was basically just pouring in through the monastery windows, is a mystery to this day.) The apostrophe, which could be grown in the rocky soil of the Burgundian lowlands, was, along with salted pork, the only commodity that was in ready supply, and the monks had learned early on that salted pork made for poor punctuation.
Thus it was that the apostrophe began to be used both for contractions and for possessives, a commonplace that worked well for hundreds of years, until one day there was a disagreement between two monks about how one could make the possessive form of it, when
it's was already being used as a contraction of
it is. The ensuing quarrel resulted in a schism that ended with the heretical Possessivists fleeing underground, where they would remain, subsisting on a meager diet of mushrooms and lichen, while the powers that be decreed, somewhat irrationally, that to make
it possessive, one had only to add an
s, with no apostrophe. Thus did
its become the standard possessive form until the early 1990s, when the heretics emerged to threaten the existence of Western civilization with their divisive teachings.
The truth, which the Authorities have tried to bury for lo these many centuries, is that the use of
it's as a contraction and not as possessive, is completely arbitrary. The controversy could have gone the other way, in which case pedants like me would be railing against people who use
it's to mean
it is. But at some point society determined that
it's should be used as a contraction, just as we determined that the word
chair means "a seat, esp. for one person, usually having four legs for support and a rest for the back and often having rests for the arms." You can start using the word
chair to mean "a small tuft of cat hair that blows past one's line of vision while one is watching television, thereby momentarily distracting one from the happenings of
Desperate Housewives" if you like, but don't expect the rest of us to know what the f--- you are talking about.
There's no
moral issue here, as if God came down from the heavens and decreed that
it's is to be used only as a contraction. The issue is one of courtesy to one's readers, and not looking like a retard. If you're interested in accommodating your readers (not to mention
acquiring readers in the first place), it's a good idea to write in their primary language, using punctuation in the way that makes sense to most of them. Of course if you're writing for retards who don't know the difference, or you are interested in appearing to be a retard yourself, then you can disregard this advice.
I trust that this post has been helpful to you. Please let me know how I can be of further assistance.
Labels: Language