Noelinho.org

At this point, you either think I’m crazy, or, in your head at least, you’re doing a wild dance imagining a panda holding up a bank.

Quite frankly, I am thoroughly sick of people who can’t use apostrophes and it’s really doing my head in. It’s a crime far worse than using Comic Sans on the end-of-year accounts. It’s that bad. Use of apostrophes is taught in primary school (or at least, it was when I was there), and secondary school too. Everyone goes to school and most people have brains; therefore, few people have a good excuse for displaying an inability to use an apostrophe in an appropriate manner (under 5s exempted).

Please forgive me, for I am not going to give a complete, in depth history and explanation of every possible complexity of using the apostrophe, but I would like to give a few basic pointers.

1. Possessive nouns – You use these to indicate ownership. For example, this is my website. It’s Noel’s website. I own it. Therefore, give me an apostrophe to show that, and make sure it goes before the letter s. This goes for organisations too, so it would be Labour’s website, even though Labour consist of more than one person. But say Jimmy and Graham – two boys – have a website, it would be the boys’ website. Why? Because there is more than one boy, so the apostrophe goes after the s to show this. Ownership requires an apostrophe.
2. “It’s” and “Its” – This is a really simple exception. If you mean “it is”, or, “it has”, use “it’s”. Otherwise, use “its”. Understand? There is no possessive apostrophe with “its”. Simple.
3. Plurals – no, you don’t stick an apostrophe in just because it’s a plural. Example: “the older sister went to market”. Singular, no apostrophe. Example 2: “the sisters went to market”. Notice the subtle s that was added; it was added to show plurality. No apostrophe required. Example 3: “the sisters’ dog went to market”. OK, I’m stretching it, but the apostrophe is put in here because the sisters – there are two in my mind – own the dog.

There are more rules, and there are occasions where people will fight over the detail of what is correct and what is acceptable under “common usage” (read uneducated proletarians). However, these are the three basic rules to get right. If you, having read this, fail to turn from your slothful ways, I reserve the right to smack you. Really hard. Repeatedly.

Clear? Thanks.

Tags: Rant

This entry was posted by Noelinho on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 23:55 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.