Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

by Lynne Truss

  So if this book doesn’t instruct about punctuation, what does it do? Well, you know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation. It’s about how we got the punctuation we have today; how such a tiny but adaptable system of marks allows us to notate most (but not all) types of verbal expression; and how (according to Beachcomber) a greengrocer in days of yore inspired Good Queen Bess to create the post of Apostropher Royal. But mainly it’s about making sticklers feel good about their seventh-sense ability to see dead punctuation (whisper it in verge-of-tears tones: “It doesn’t know it’s dead”) and to defend their sense of humour. I have two cartoons I treasure. The first shows a row of ten Roman soldiers, one of them prone on the ground, with the cheerful caption (from a survivor of the cull), “Hey, this decimation isn’t as bad as they say it is!” The second shows a bunch of vague, stupid-looking people standing outside a building, and behind them a big sign that says “Illiterates’ Entrance”. And do you want to know the awful truth? In the original drawing, it said, “Illiterate’s Entrance”, so I changed it. Painted correction fluid over the wrong apostrophe; inserted the right one. Yes, some of us were born to be punctuation vigilantes.

  *

  The Tractable Apostrophe

  In the spring of 2001 the ITV1 show Popstars manufactured a pop phenomenon for our times: a singing group called Hear’Say. The announcement of the Hear’Say name was quite a national occasion, as I recall; people actually went out in very large numbers to buy their records; meanwhile, newspapers, who insist on precision in matters of address, at once learned to place Hear’Say’s apostrophe correctly and attend to the proper spacing. To refer in print to this group as Hearsay (one word) would be wrong, you see. To call it Hear-Say (hyphenated) would show embarrassing ignorance of popular culture. And so it came to pass that Hear’Say’s poor, oddly placed little apostrophe was replicated everywhere and no one gave a moment’s thought to its sufferings. No one saw the pity of its position, hanging there in eternal meaninglessness, silently signalling to those with eyes to see, “I’m a legitimate punctuation mark, get me out of here.” Checking the Hear’Say website a couple of years later, I discover that the only good news in this whole sorry saga was that, well, basically, once Kym had left to marry Jack in January 2002 – after rumours, counter-rumours and official denials – the group thankfully folded within eighteen months of its inception.

  Now, there are no laws against imprisoning apostrophes and making them look daft. Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it. But the naming of Hear’Say in 2001 was nevertheless a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy. As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price. Too many jobs have been heaped on this tiny mark, and – far from complaining – the apostrophe has seemingly requested “More weight”, just like that martyrish old codger in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, when religious bigots in black hats with buckles on are subjecting him to death by crushing. “More weight,” the apostrophe has bravely said – if ever more faintly. “More weight,” it manages to whisper still. But I ask you: how much more abuse must the apostrophe endure? Now that it’s on its last legs (and idiotic showbiz promoters stick apostrophes in names for purely decorative purposes), isn’t it time to recognise that the apostrophe needs our help?

  The English language first picked up the apostrophe in the 16th century. The word in Greek means “turning away”, and hence “omission” or “elision”. In classical texts, it was used to mark dropped letters, as in t’cius for “tertius”; and when English printers adopted it, this was still its only function. Remember that comical pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost saying, “You find not the apostraphas, and so miss the accent”? Well, no, of course you don’t, nobody remembers anything said by that frightful bore, and we certainly shan’t detain ourselves bothering to work out what he was driving at. All we need to know is that, in Shakespeare’s time, an apostrophe indicated omitted letters, which meant Hamlet could say with supreme apostrophic confidence: “Fie on’t! O fie!”; “‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d”; and even, “I am too much i’ the sun” – the latter, incidentally, a clear case of a writer employing a newfangled punctuation mark entirely for the sake of it, and condemning countless generations of serious long-haired actors to adopt a knowing expression and say i’ – as if this actually added anything to the meaning.

  If only the apostrophe’s life had stayed that simple. At some point in the 17th century, however, printers started to intrude an apostrophe before the “s” in singular possessive cases (“the girl’s dress”), and from then on quite frankly the whole thing has spiralled into madness. In the 18th century, printers started to put it after plural possessives as well (“the girls’ dresses”). Some historians of grammar claim, incidentally, that the original possessive use of the apostrophe signified a contraction of the historic “his”; and personally, I believed this attractive theory for many years, simply on the basis of knowing Ben Jonson’s play Sejanus, his Fall, and reasoning that this was self-evidently halfway to “Sejanus’s Fall”. But blow me, if there aren’t differences of opinion. There are other historians of grammar who say this Love-His-Labour-Is-Lost explanation is ignorant conjecture and should be forgotten as soon as heard. Certainly the Henry-His-Wives (Henry’s Wives) rationalisation falls down noticeably when applied to female possessives, because “Elizabeth Her Reign” would have ended up logically as “Elizabeth’r Reign”, which would have had the regrettable result of making people sound a) a bit stupid, b) a bit drunk, or c) a bit from the West Country.

  So what are the jobs an apostrophe currently has on its CV? Before we start tearing out our hair at sloppy, ignorant current usage, first let us acknowledge the sobering wisdom of the Oxford Companion to English Literature: “There never was a golden age in which the rules for the possessive apostrophe were clear-cut and known, understood and followed by most educated people.” And then let us check that we know the rules of what modern grammarians call “possessive determiners” and “possessive pronouns” – none of which requires an apostrophe.

  Possessive determiners

  my our

  your your

  his their

  her their

  its their

  Possessive pronouns

  my ours

  your yours

  his theirs

  her theirs

  its theirs

  And now, let us just count the various important tasks the apostrophe is obliged to execute every day.

  1 It indicates a possessive in a singular noun:

  The boy’s hat

  The First Lord of the Admiralty’s rather smart front door

  This seems simple. But not so fast, Batman. When the possessor is plural, but does not end in an “s”, the apostrophe similarly precedes the “s”:

  The children’s playground

  The women’s movement

  But when the possessor is a regular plural, the apostrophe follows the “s”:

  The boys’ hats (more than one boy)

  The babies’ bibs

  I apologise if you know all this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying “Giant Kid’s Playground”, and then wonder why everyone stays away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)

  2 It indicates time or quantity:

  In one week’s time

  Four yards’ worth

  Two weeks’ notice (Warner Brothers, take note)

  3 It indicates the omission of figures in dates:

 
The summer of ‘68

  4 It indicates the omission of letters:

  We can’t go to Jo’burg (We cannot go to Johannesburg – perhaps because we can’t spell the middle bit)

  She’d’ve had the cat-o’-nine-tails, I s’pose, if we hadn’t stopped ‘im (She would have had a right old lashing, I reckon, if we had not intervened)

  However, it is generally accepted that familiar contractions such as bus (omnibus), flu (influenza), phone (telephone), photo (photograph) and cello (violoncello) no longer require apologetic apostrophes. In fact to write “Any of that wine left in the ‘fridge, dear?” looks today self-conscious, not to say poncey. Other contractions have made the full leap into new words, anyway. There is simply nowhere to hang an apostrophe on “nuke” (explode a nuclear device), “telly” (television) or “pram” (perambulator) – although, believe me, people have tried.

  Most famously of all, the apostrophe of omission creates the word “it’s”:

  It’s your turn (it is your turn)

  It’s got very cold (it has got very cold)

  It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht(no idea)

  To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler. The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands for “it is” or “it has”. If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has” then what you require is “its”. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

  5 It indicates strange, non-standard English:

  A forest of apostrophes in dialogue (often accompanied by unusual capitalisation) conventionally signals the presence in a text of a peasant, a cockney or an earnest northerner from whom the heart-chilling word “nobbut” may soon be heard. Here is what the manly gamekeeper Mellors says to his employer’s wife in chapter eight of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Letter:

  ‘“Appen yer’d better ‘ave this key, an’ Ah min fend for’t’ bods some other road … ‘Appen Ah can find anuther pleece as’ll du for rearin’ th’ pheasants. If yer want ter be ‘ere, yo’ll non want me messin’ abahta’ th’ time.”

  “Why don’t you speak ordinary English?” Lady Chatterley inquires, saucily.

  6 It features in Irish names such as O’Neill and O’Casey:

  Again the theory that this is a simple contraction – this time of “of” (as in John o’ Gaunt) – is pure woolly misconception. Not a lot of people know this, but the “O” in Irish names is an anglicisation of “ua”, meaning grandson.

  7 It indicates the plurals of letters:

  How many f’s are there in Fulham? (Larky answer, beloved of football fans: there’s only one f in Fulham)

  In the winter months, his R’s blew off (old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore joke, explaining the mysterious zoo sign

  “T OPICAL FISH, THIS WAY”)

  8 It also indicates plurals of words:

  What are the do’s and don’t’s?

  Are there too many but’s and and’s at the beginnings of sentences these days?

  I hope that by now you are already feeling sorry for the apostrophe. Such a list of legitimate apostrophe jobs certainly brings home to us the imbalance of responsibility that exists in the world of punctuation. I mean, full stops are quite important, aren’t they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burnout from all the thankless effort. Only one significant task has been lifted from the apostrophe’s workload in recent years: it no longer has to appear in the plurals of abbreviations (“MPs”) or plural dates (“1980s”). Until quite recently, it was customary to write “MP’s” and “1980’s” – and in fact this convention still applies in America. British readers of The New Yorker who assume that this august publication is in constant ignorant error when it allows “1980’s” evidently have no experience of how that famously punctilious periodical operates editorially.

  But it is in the nature of punctuation lovers to care about such things, and I applaud all those who seek to protect the apostrophe from misuse. For many years Keith Waterhouse operated an Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe in the Daily Mirror and then the Daily Mail, cheered on by literally millions of readers. He has printed hundreds of examples of apostrophe horrors, my all-time favourite being the rather subtle, “Prudential – were here to help you”, which looks just a bit unsettling until you realise that what it’s supposed to say is, “Prudential – we’re here to help you”. And Keith Waterhouse has many successors in the print. Kevin Myers, columnist of The Irish Times, recently published a fictional story about a man who joins the League of Signwriter’s and Grocer’s and Butcher’s Assistant’s, only to discover that his girlfriend is a stickler for grammatical precision.

  Meanwhile, William Hartston, who writes the “Beachcomber” column in The Express, has come up with the truly inspired story of the Apostropher Royal, an ancient and honourable post inaugurated in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. His story goes that a humble greengrocer (in days of yore) was delivering potatoes to Good Queen Bess and happened to notice a misplaced apostrophe in a royal decree. When he pointed it out, the Queen immediately created the office of Apostropher Royal, to control the quality and distribution of apostrophes and deliver them in wheelbarrows to all the greengrocers of England on the second Thursday of every month (Apostrophe Thursday). The present Apostropher Royal, Sir D’Anville O’M’Darlin’, concerns himself these days with such urgent issues as the tendency of “trendy publishers” to replace quotation marks with colons and dashes, the effect of which is that pairs of unwanted inverted commas can be illegally shipped abroad, split down the middle to form low-grade apostrophes and sold back to an unwary British public.

  Do people other than professional writers care, though? Well, yes, and I have proof in heaps. As I was preparing for this book, I wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph, hoping to elicit a few punctuation horror stories, and it was like detonating a dam. Hundreds of emails and letters arrived, all of them testifying to the astonishing power of recall we sticklers have when things have annoyed us (“It was in 1987, I’ll never forget, and it said “CREAM TEA’S”); and also to the justifiable despair of the well educated in a dismally illiterate world. Reading the letters, I was alternately thrilled that so many people had bothered to write and sunk low by such overwhelming evidence of Britain’s stupidity and indifference. The vast majority of letters concerned misplaced apostrophes, of course, in potato’s and lemon’s. But it was interesting, once I started to analyse and sort the examples, to discover that the greengrocer’s apostrophe formed just one depressing category of the overall, total, mind-bogglingly depressing misuse of the apostrophe. Virtually every proper application of this humble mark utterly stumps the people who write to us officially, who paint signs, or who sell us fruit and veg. The following is just a tiny selection of the examples I received:

  Singular possessive instead of simple plural (the “greengrocer’s apostrophe”):

  Trouser’s reduced

  Coastguard Cottage’s

  Next week: nouns and apostrophe’s! (BBC website advertising a grammar course for children)

  Singular possessive instead of plural possessive:

  Pupil’s entrance (on a very se
lective school, presumably)

  Adult Learner’s Week (lucky him)

  Frog’s Piss (French wine putting unfair strain on single frog)

  Member’s May Ball (but with whom will the member dance?)

  Nude Reader’s Wives (intending “Readers’ Nude Wives”, of course, but conjuring up an interesting picture of polygamous nude reader attended by middle-aged women in housecoats and fluffy slippers)

  Plural possessive instead of singular possessive:

  Lands’ End (mail-order company which roundly denies anything wrong with name)

  Bobs’ Motors

  No possessive where possessive is required:

  Citizens Advice Bureau

  Mens Toilets

  Britains Biggest Junction (Clapham)

  Dandling expectations caused by incorrect pluralisation:

  Pansy’s ready (is she?)

  Cyclist’s only (his only what?)

  Please replace the trolley’s (replace the trolley’s what?)

  and best of all:

  Nigger’s out (a sign seen in New York, under which was written, wickedly: “But he’ll be back shortly”)

  Unintentional sense from unmarked possessive:

  Dicks in tray (try not to think about it)

  New members welcome drink (doubtless true)

  Someone knows an apostrophe is required … but where, oh where?

  It need’nt be a pane (on a van advertising discount glass)

  Ladie’s hairdresser

  Mens coat’s

  Childrens’ education … (in a letter from the head of education at the National Union of Teachers)