Week 6 - Apostrophes

Pretty soon we're going to start talking about misuses of individual words (I know you've all been waiting patiently), but there's one more topic I'd like to get out of the way first. Let's talk about apostrophes. You might have noticed that I've already used a bunch of them, just in the first sentences of this paragraph. All of them so far have been apostrophes used as contractions, i.e. two words joined together with an apostrophe, minus a couple of letters. Last week we talked about compound words, which are two words joined together with a hyphen, but with no loss of letters. The idea with a contraction is that you've thrown away a couple of letters and replaced them with an apostrophe, e.g.

"we're" for "we are," "you've" for "you have," "there's" for "there is," and "I'd" for "I would," all in the first sentence above.

A lot of these examples are easy, since leaving out the apostrophe gives a completely different word. If we left out the apostrophe in "we're," for example, we'd be left with "were," which is pronounced differently and means something different, so we'd never get confused. Same thing for "I'd," since leaving out the apostrophe leaves "Id," which means something else entirely.

The third example, "there's," is a little tougher, since leaving out the apostrophe doesn't give a legitimate word that just means something else. There are a lot more examples like "there's," many of them more confusing. Here's one that a lot of people have trouble with:

The osprey typically builds it's nest at the top of a tall tree.

That use of "it's" is wrong, since we didn't intend to say "...builds it is nest...," but it's a mistake that's made frequently, because everyone knows the other rule, that an apostrophe "s" is used for a possessive. In the example above, "it" refers back to the osprey, and the sentence is about the nest that belongs to the bird.

So how do you decide? You know you want to use "its," but you don't know whether to put an apostrophe in it. In this case, you can figure it out by subtraction: you know because there are two different meanings of the word, depending on whether it has an apostrophe or not, and since you already know that "it's" means "it is," then "its" must be the possessive, and you should have written

The osprey typically builds its nest at the top of a tall tree.

Let's take another example:

Joe is someone who's potential has yet to be realized.

Here, we can use the same reasoning: "who's" is reserved as a contraction of "who is," so it can't be right as a possessive. On the other hand, there's no such word in English as "whos," so we have to add an "e" to make it right:

Joe is someone whose potential has yet to be realized.

It's annoying that sometimes you just have to memorize the rule, but no one said English was easy!

One more thing while we're on the topic of apostrophes used for possessives: it's important to remember that possessives are supposed to be used only for people (and maybe animals), but not for things. For example, you can say

Jane's dog is called Bo,

or maybe even

Jane's dog's name is Bo,

but saying

The floor's shine makes it easy for Bo to see his reflection

is not correct, since "floor" is not a person or an animal. Such a misuse is called an "anthropomorphism," which you all remember from high school. If you need to convey an important point about your floor, it's better to use its longer form and say

The shine on the floor makes it easy for Bo to see himself walking along.

It may seem as if there are exceptions to the ban on anthropomorphisms. The following sentence is fine, for example:

Michael had several weeks of practice before he took his driving test.

but it's also OK to say

Michael had several weeks' practice before he took his driving test.

In this latter version, the use of the apostrophe is a special case. It's not quite right to say that it's a possessive, since the "practice" doesn't really belong to the "weeks," and it's not a contraction, since we haven't thrown away any letters to make a new word. On the other hand, I suppose you could call it a "semi-possessive pseudo-contraction," since it's almost a possessive and there are in fact two letters missing, the word "of" in the first example!