Making a Point (27 page)

With the grammarians disagreeing, the printers had to take a stand. George Smallfield, for example, in
The Principles of English Punctuation
(1838), is in no doubt:

The reader is also requested to remember, that, besides
nouns
, there are
pronouns
, which have a possessive case, answering to the genitive case of nouns; but though it is not uncommon to see the possessive case written with an apostrophe, that mark is unnecessary. No one would now write he's or hi's for
his
; but it would not be more incorrect than her's for
hers
– our's for
ours
– your's for
yours
– and their's for
theirs
. The
s
, in all these instances, is the sign of the possessive case, and is alone sufficient. Hence, it is improper to conclude a letter by signing one's-self, Your's.

This view became the norm: no apostrophes for pronouns – much to the confusion of generations of schoolchildren who, having had the rule drummed into them that the apostrophe marks possession, now find a set of examples where it doesn't. (And additionally, an exception within the exceptions, for possessive
one's
was allowed to keep its
apostrophe, presumably because of its association with the numeral.)

Uncertainty over its use in the possessive later extended to its use to mark a plural. To begin with, the issue received hardly any recognition. Examples like
potato'
s are never mentioned, and on the whole the plural apostrophe gets a good press. Goold Brown's
Institutes of English Grammar
(1890), for example, accepts it in such cases as
Two a's, three b's, four 9's
, and where it acts as a guide to pronunciation, as in
pro's and con's
, where
pros
might not be recognized, or mispronounced as ‘pross'. Henry Fowler was evidently not bothered by it, for he makes no mention of plurality errors in the entry on ‘Possessive Puzzles' in his
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
(1926).

But during the twentieth century, attitudes changed. When Ernest Gowers revised Fowler's
Dictionary
for a second edition in 1965, he added a section to Possessive Puzzles. He allows an apostrophe in
dot your i's and cross your t's
, but he denies it in such cases as
one million whys
,
the 1930s
, and
N.C.O.s
, commenting:

To insert an apostrophe in the plural of an ordinary noun is a fatuous vulgarism which, according to a correspondent of
The Times
, is infecting display writing.

He quotes
tea's
,
shirt's
,
alterations's
, and other examples from shops and signs. His opinion was influential; the newspapers continued to publish letters from their readers (language issues always guarantee a good letter-bag); and by the end of the century people were pillorying the usage everywhere. According to
OED
citations, the first person to associate it with greengrocers' signs was Keith Waterhouse in
English Our English
(1991), and the label
greengrocer's apostrophe
has its first recorded use the following year. It caught on, and
sparked something of a craze to find the worst misuses. A letter to
The Independent
(14 February 1993) said simply:

The best greengrocer's apostrophe I've ever seen is
asparagu's
.

But greengrocers weren't the only businesses to be caught up in apostrophic controversy.

29

Apostrophes: the present (and future)

The same uncertainties that have caused concern among individual users of English have also affected businesses. Here, the main issue is in relation to the possessive, where the variation seen since the seventeenth century is writ large – literally. Pub-signs display
The Bull's Head
and
The Bulls Head
. Shop fronts show
Gents' Hairdressers
and
Gents Hairdressers
. Stores have signs pointing to
Women's Clothing
and
Womens Clothing
. Signposts point you towards the
Magistrates/Magistrates' Court
. In London, the Piccadilly Line takes you to
Earl's Court
and then
Barons Court
.

As you walk around London, you see
Harrods
,
Selfridges
,
Boots
,
Barclays
,
Lloyds
, and
Starbucks
, but
McDonald's
,
Harry Ramsden's
,
T.G.I. Friday's
, and (before 2012)
Waterstone's
. Go into a bookshop and you can buy a copy of
Gulliver's Travels
or
Finnegans Wake
. But if you go to the Irish pub in Edinburgh or the Irish restaurant in New York, you would be visiting
Finnegan's Wake
. It's difficult to generalize about what has led to these various outcomes; the story behind each name is individual. But some trends can be observed, as we see if we explore a couple of the histories.

Charles Henry Harrod opened his shop in Knightsbridge in 1849. A sign at the front of the building in 1874 said
Harrod's Stores
. The apostrophe was still being used twenty years later: an advertisement in 1895 for a sewing-machine tells readers that it can be bought from the first floor of
Harrod's
Stores, Brompton
. But as the century ended, variation crept in. Manufacturer marks on metalware products made for the firm show a mixture of
Harrod's
and
Harrods
. Two catalogues have
Harrods'
. By the early 1900s, the apostrophe had largely disappeared. An advertisement in
The Times
for 9 December 1907 says:
15 acres of Christmas gifts at Harrods
. The word
Stores
was officially dropped in 1920, and there is no apostrophe after that date. Letters to the press worrying about the change gradually died away.

Lloyds is an even more interesting case. In 1765 the company was set up by four people: two named Lloyd and two named Taylor. The Taylors eventually left the business, so Lloyds & Co became the norm. As there were two people, the plural form was correct. In 1865 the firm became Lloyds' Banking Company. However, Lloyds was the legal name in the 1889 Certificate of Incorporation, and the company would have had to enter into a fresh process of registration if they wanted to change it – something they didn't want to do. Why did they decide to drop the apostrophe when the name shortened? Professor of English Cedric Barfoot wrote to the Lloyds archivist in 1990 to find out, and reported his reply in an article (‘Trouble with the apostrophe: or, you know what hairdresser's are like'):

The decision to drop the apostrophe was no doubt taken, after some agonising, in 1889 because nobody was getting
Lloyds'
right. People automatically assumed (as they still do) that the firm originated as
Lloyd's
, and legal documents drawn up under the name of
Lloyd's Bank
were no doubt putting us in some difficulty. The only way to avoid expensive and lengthy unscrambling of errors has been to eradicate their cause.

Might it be reintroduced? The archivist thought not, mainly
because
Lloyd's
now refers to the shipping and insurance company, and this would be to add further confusion. (Notwithstanding, many city journalists do make the distinction, continuing to use
Lloyds'
for the bank.) He concluded:

the reason for there being no apostrophe in our legal name is that there is no easy place to put it: if we were
Lloyds' Bank
(as some would say we should be) no-one would get it right; if we were
Lloyd's Bank
, we would be insensitive to our roots, and invite confusion with other interests.

We can see in these cases how several issues intertwine in deciding what to do with an apostrophe: notions of tradition, ownership, client relationship, public identity, legal standing, cost, and time. The death of an owner can affect the matter. While Jesse Boot was alive, there was a natural reason to refer to the company as
Boot's
. It asserted his position. The apostrophe was felt to be less needed after his death. And if a company is taken over, as often happens, there is even less need to remind the new owners of how things used to be – hence the case of
Waterstone's
, taken over once again in 2011, and this time losing its apostrophe as part of a rebranding exercise.

The
Waterstones
decision sparked huge publicity, most of it negative from those who felt that this was yet another nail in the apostrophe's coffin. The new chief executive defended the change on both semantic and pragmatic grounds. His semantic argument wasn't so convincing: dropping the apostrophe suggests plurality, he said, there being lots of the stores. This isn't a strong reason, for apostrophes can disappear regardless of how many stores are involved (there are not lots of Harrods). His pragmatic arguments were more powerful, citing motivation from the simplified punctuation found on the Internet, and referring to the modern trend to make public print less cluttered in appearance.

The strongest pragmatic reason is always identity. Owners can call their businesses whatever they like, as long as there's no conflict with already-existing businesses, and the decision will be based on factors to do with corporate identity, reflecting the range of considerations we have seen operating in such cases as Lloyds. Historical arguments cease to be relevant in a new commercial climate. It's no good people saying ‘Waterstone's was originally short for Waterstone's Bookshop' if the company thinks a more succinct name will have greater impact. Historical arguments date as rapidly as the social changes that distance us from them.

Because of their public prominence, business naming decisions do reinforce a climate of change, so those who feel their life depends on the use of the apostrophe are right to feel threatened. But this climate isn't recent, as some have suggested (usually citing the Internet): it has been evolving throughout the past century, and can be seen in other naming contexts, especially in place-names.

In 1890 the US Board on Geographic Names made a far-reaching decision, which is still in force:

Apostrophes suggesting possession or association are not to be used within the body of a proper geographic name.

Their reasoning was semantic.

The word or words that form a geographic name … change from words having specific dictionary meaning to fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities. The need to imply possession or association no longer exists.

It's thought that a quarter of a million apostrophes were deleted from US names as a consequence (
Harpers Ferry
,
Pikes Peak
, and so on). The apostrophe stayed if the name had nothing to do with possession, such as
O'Fallon
in Illinois.
Administrative names were also exceptions in the official US repository, the Geographic Names Information System, such as schools, churches, cemeteries, hospitals, airports, and shopping centres. Such names, the Board concluded, ‘are best left to the organization that administers them'.

That makes sense. As with Waterstones, semantic reasoning alone never convinces. Underneath every semantic argument is a pragmatic argument crying to get out. And it's the pragmatic factors that count for most. Place-names in particular are governed by tradition: along with surnames and dialect words, they form the autobiography of a community. We are talking identity again, not intelligibility, even though there may be some cases where it isn't clear whether the name refers to a singular or a plural (was it
Pike
or
Pikes
after whom the peak was named?). And local protests can force a change – though not very often. The US Board gets around thirty applications for the use of an apostrophe each year, but only five ‘possessive' names have been recognized: Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (1933), Ike's Point, New Jersey (1944), John E's Pond, Rhode Island (1963), Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona (1995), and Clark's Mountain, Oregon (2002).

Variations in the punctuation of public naming practices reinforce the climate of uncertainty that surrounds everyday usage, and this fosters inconsistency. If there's a clear semantic or pragmatic reason for an apostrophe, the usage will attract no attention. When we need to capture a contrast in meaning, to avoid ambiguity (such as
I love my uncles visits
), there's no argument: the apostrophe proves to be a useful device, allowing us to succinctly say what would otherwise be wordy (
the visits of my uncle/uncles
). And when we need to mark an identity, there's no argument: nobody will dare to tell big
Dermot O'Connell
that his apostrophe is unnecessary.

Our problem comes only when questions of ambiguity or identity do
not
arise. We don't misunderstand the Shakespeare examples in
Chapter 28
, even though they have no apostrophes, because the linguistic context tells us clearly what is meant. And we don't get confused if signs pointing to the London railway station sometimes say
King's Cross
and sometimes
Kings Cross
. (The website <
www.kingsx.co.uk
> has (in 2014) a big heading:
King's Cross Online
; immediately underneath is the heading
Welcome to Kings Cross Online
.) Cases like these make us feel that apostrophes are unnecessary: inserting or omitting them makes no difference to our ability to understand a meaning or to perceive an identity. And because these are in the vast majority, we find ourselves faced with the variation everywhere we go. This is what leads to people wanting to do something, such as form an Apostrophe Protection Society or go on a typo hunt around America.

What is it that makes some people react so strongly to apostrophes, while others don't? Educational background is certainly part of it. If we have had apostrophes beaten into us in school, then we will defend them to the death. As one listener wrote to me, after I talked about punctuation in a programme for my Radio 4
English Now
series in the 1980s: ‘I suffered for my apostrophes, which is why I get upset when I see people misusing them.' Social and cultural background is a part of it too: if we were brought up at home in an apostrophic atmosphere, we will have assimilated our elders' linguistic values – values that reflect the need to respect the conventions that society recognizes as Standard English. If we experienced a more relaxed personal punctuational history, we are less likely to feel strongly about these things, and will feel puzzled, confused, or angry when others harangue us for our supposed laxity.

That is why the Internet is at the centre of so many
punctuation arguments these days. We are in the middle of a transitional period in which our experience of the written language is undergoing a radical shift. The Internet now contains more written language than in all the libraries of the world combined, and the screen (fixed or mobile) is the place where young people most often experience it. The apostrophe is but one of the features that provide us with a different linguistic experience when we read and write online, or send and receive text messages by phone, but changes in its usage were among the first features to be noticed. As with the hyphen, omission was fostered by aesthetics, ergonomics, and fashion: it looked better, made typing easier, and everybody else was doing it.

The Internet didn't start these trends but it certainly reinforced them and speeded them up. And the constraints of the technology particularly affected the apostrophe, as this was one of the symbols that was excluded from the domain name system that provides us with our Internet addresses. The apostrophic identity of
McDonald's
restaurants is clear; but online we have to use such addresses as <
www.mcdonalds.co.uk
>. Multiply this example by all the names where apostrophes traditionally form part of an identity, and it's easy to see how online usage as a whole could one day be more generally affected, and eventually transfer into offline situations.

Media headlines about the Internet causing the ‘death of the apostrophe' are premature. Electronic communication hasn't been around long enough for us to see what kind of long-term linguistic impact it will have. At the moment there are plenty of apostrophes online, their frequency depending on the genre of Internet activity we're looking at. They are infrequent in short messaging and instant messaging, for example, but still strongly present in blogs and websites. Their use in emails is very much determined by individual differences. Someone who begins an email to me with ‘Dear
Professor' is more likely to use apostrophes than someone who greets me with a ‘Hi Dave'.

Teachers have to cope with all this. They have to teach their students how to
manage
the apostrophe, which these days means guiding them towards an informed awareness of the stylistic differences that exist. At one extreme, we have extremely informal styles of communication where nonstandard English is routine and writers rarely use an apostrophe – and only when it's absolutely essential to make a meaning clear. At the other extreme we have formal and informal styles of communication where Standard English is obligatory and the use of the apostrophe is motivated by the traditional rules governing letter omission (
haven't
), possession (
boy's/boys'
), and the avoidance of awkward juxtaposition (
dot the i's
), and sanctioned by the recommendations of examining boards. In between, we have the areas where educated people, perfectly capable of using apostrophes, choose to drop them for professional reasons, such as achieving a ‘clean' look in a brand-name or a street name. Why they do so makes for an interesting teacher–student discussion.