The wonderful world of apostrophes

Do you guys remember what a greengrocers’ apostrophe is? I bet you do.

It’s that horrible little thing when people mean to say the plural of a noun and then write it with an apostrophe that isn’t supposed to be there.

A few funny examples of greengrocers’ apostrophes that I’ve found:

I also bet you’ve wondered why people screw it up so much. Now I can’t speak for any native speakers here, but as a Dutch speaker that speaks English as a second language, I know why we Dutch tend to mess it up. It’s because of our Dutch grammar.

In Dutch there are different rules for using the apostrophe and thanks to this, the Dutch folks not as well versed in the English language are more likely to slip up when using apostrophes.

The rule that gets the Dutch into trouble mostly is this one:

The apostrophe is used with words in plural that end with a, e, i, o, u or y that are preceded by a consonant or syllable boundary. Syllable boundary means that the ‘e’ at the end sounds like /ee/.

Then you get plurals like this:

Opa’s, azalea’s, ski’s, auto’s, accu’s, baby’s. (See how we stole most of these words? Opa means granddad by the way).

This even comes with a bunch of exceptions. I won’t bore you with those.

Now you can see why (certain) foreigners can be horribly confused when using apostrophes. The aforementioned rules aren’t of impact on you natives though, so I’m going to move a little deeper into the wonderful world of the apostrophe; I’m going to give you the actual CP stylebook rules! Yay!

These are:

1. Use an apostrophe to denote possession.

Santa’s socks, Rudolph’s nose, a llama’s hat etc.

2. Use an apostrophe to indicate the omission of letters or figures.

She’d, it’s, couldn’t, rock ‘n’roll, “Give ‘em hell!”, the early ‘30s etc.

3. Use an apostrophe with verbs formed from capitals.

OK’s, OK’ing, KO’d, MC’ing, X’d out.

4. Use an apostrophe in plurals of lowercase letters.

Mind your p’s and q’s. Dot your i’s and cross your t’s.

5. In general, do not use an apostrophe with plurals of capital letters or numbers.

She graduated with straight As, the three Rs, the ABCs, two VIPs, a formation of F-18s, the Dirty ‘30s.

There is an exception to this rule however; you use an apostrophe with plurals of capital letters if it helps avoid ambiguity. E.g. A’s in math and physics are hard to come by.

6. Do not use an apostrophe to form the plurals in expressions like the whys and wherefores.

Here are a few dos, don’ts and maybes. I don’t want any ifs, ands or buts. Just give us straight yeses or noes.

You use an apostrophe to form the plurals of words being discussed as words though. E.g. three as’s, too many is’s, not enough the’s.

7. Do not use an apostrophe with shortened forms that have become accepted as complete words.

Cello, copter, flu, gym, phone.

This is all you need to know about apostrophes. The next time you browse the Internet, just remember, not everybody is a native English speaker…

(Disclaimer: this does not include horrible 13 year old spelling and the like).