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

by Lynne Truss

  The Peoples Princess’ (on memorial mug)

  Freds’ restaurant

  Apostrophes put in place names/proper names:

  Dear Mr Steven’s

  XMA’S TREES

  Glady’s (badge on salesgirl)

  Did’sbury

  It’s or Its’ instead of Its:

  Hundreds of examples, many from respectable National Trust properties and big corporations, but notably:

  Hot Dogs a Meal in Its’ Self (sign in Great Yarmouth)

  Recruitment at it’s best (slogan of employment agency)

  ” … to welcome you to the British Library, it’s services and catalogues” (reader induction pamphlet at British Library)

  Plain illiteracy:

  “… giving the full name and title of the person who’s details are given in Section 02” (on UK passport application form)

  Make our customer’s live’s easier (Abbey National advertisement)

  Gateaux’s (evidently never spelled any other way)

  Your 21 today! (on birthday card)

  Commas instead of apostrophes:

  Antique,s (on A12o near Colchester)

  apples,s

  orange,‘s

  grape,s (all thankfully on the same stall)

  Signs that have given up trying:

  Reader offer

  Author photograph

  Customer toilet

  This is a mere sample of the total I received. I heard from people whose work colleagues used commas instead of apostrophes; from someone rather thoughtfully recommending a restaurant called l’Apostrophe in Reims (address on request); and from a Somerset man who had cringed regularly at a sign on a market garden until he discovered that its proprietor’s name was – you couldn’t make it up – R. Carrott. This explained why the sign said “Carrott’s” at the top, you see, but then listed other vegetables and fruits spelled and punctuated perfectly correctly.

  Up to now, we have looked at the right and wrong uses of the apostrophe, and I have felt on pretty safe ground. All this is about to change, however, because there are areas of apostrophe use that are not so simple, and we must now follow the apostrophe as it flits innocently into murky tunnels of style, usage and (oh no!) acceptable exception. Take the possessive of proper names ending in “s” – such as my own. Is this properly “Lynne Truss’ book” or “Lynne Truss’s book”? One correspondent (whose name I have changed) wrote with a tone of impatience: “From an early age I knew that if I wanted to write Philippa Jones’ book I did NOT WRITE Philippa Jones’s book with a second’s’. I see this error often even on a school minibus: St James’s School. Perhaps the rules have changed or the teachers just do not know nowadays.”

  Sadly, this correspondent has been caught in the embarrassing position of barking up two wrong trees at the same time; but only because tastes have changed in the matter. Current guides to punctuation (including that ultimate authority, Fowler’s Modern English Usage) state that with modern names ending in “s” (including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final “s”), the “s” is required after the apostrophe:

  Keats’s poems Philippa

  Jones’s book

  St James’s Square

  Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers

  With names from the ancient world, it is not:

  Archimedes’ screw

  Achilles’ heel

  If the name ends in an “iz” sound, an exception is made:

  Bridges’ score

  Moses’ tablets

  And an exception is always made for Jesus:

  Jesus’ disciples

  However, these are matters of style and preference that are definitely not set in stone, and it’s a good idea not to get fixated about them. Bill Walsh’s charmingly titled book Lapsing into a Comma (Walsh is a copy desk chief at The Washington Post) explains that while many, American newspapers prefer “Connors’ forehand”, his own preference is for “Connors’s forehand” – “and I’m happy to be working for a newspaper that feels the same way I do”. Consulting a dozen or so recently published punctuation guides, I can report that they contain minor disagreements on virtually all aspects of the above and that their only genuine consistency is in using Keats’s poems as the prime example. Strange, but true. They just can’t leave Keats alone. “It is Keats’ poems (NOT Keats’s),” they thunder. Or alternatively: “It is Keats’s poems (NOT Keats’).” Well, poor old Keats, you can’t help thinking. No wonder he developed that cough.

  Having said that there are no absolute rights and wrongs in this matter, however, when many people wrote to ask why St Thomas’ Hospital in London has no “s” after the apostrophe, I did feel that the answer must echo Dr Johnson’s when asked to explain his erroneous definition of a pastern: “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.” Of course it should be St Thomas’s Hospital. Of course it should. The trouble is that institutions, towns, colleges, families, companies and brands have authority over their own spelling and punctuation (which is often historic), and there is absolutely nothing we can do except raise an eyebrow and make a mental note. Virtually the first things a British newspaper sub-editor learns are that Lloyds TSB (the bank) has no apostrophe, unlike Lloyd’s of London (insurance); Earls Court, Gerrards Cross and St Andrews have no apostrophe (although Earl’s Court tube station seems to have acquired one); HarperCollins has no space; Bowes Lyon has no hyphen; and you have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors, reminding you that these are brand names. The satirical magazine Private Eye once printed one of the letters from Biro’s representatives, incidentally, under the memorable heading, “What a pathetic way to make a living”.

  St Thomas’ Hospital is thus the self-styled name of the hospital and that’s that. The stadium of Newcastle United FC is, similarly, St James’ Park. In the end, neither example is worth getting worked up about – in fact, on the contrary, once you have taken a few deep breaths, you may find it within you not only to tolerate these exceptions but positively to treasure them and even love them. Personally, I now lose all power of speech if I see University College London ignorantly awarded a comma where none belongs, or E. M. Forster’s title Howards End made to look ordinary by some itchy-fingered proofreader. Meanwhile, The Times Guide to English Style and Usage (1999) sensibly advises its readers not to pin their mental well-being on such matters, putting it beautifully: “Beware of organisations that have apostrophe variations as their house style, eg, St Thomas’ Hospital, where we must respect their whim.”

  It is time to confess that I have for many years struggled with one of the lesser rules of the apostrophe. I refer to the “double possessive”, which is evidently a perfectly respectable grammatical construction, but simply jars with me, and perhaps always will. We see it all the time in newspapers:

  “Elton John, a friend of the footballer’s, said last night … “

  “Elton John, a friend of the couple’s, said last night … “

  “Elton John, a friend of the Beckhams’, said last night …”

  Well, pass me the oxygen, Elton, and for heaven’s sake, stop banging on about your glitzy mates for a minute while I think. A friend of the footballer’s? Why isn’t it, “a friend of the footballer”? Doesn’t the construction “of the” do away with the need for another possessive? I mean to say, why do those sweet little Beckhams need to possess Elton John twice? Or is that a silly question?

  But fight the mounting panic and turn to Robert Burchfield’s third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1998), and what do I find? The double possessive is calmly explained, and I start to peel away the problem. Do I have any objection to the construction “a friend of mine” or “a friend of yours”? Well, no. I would never say “a friend of me” or “a friend of you”. And yes, you would say “a cousin of my mother’s”, “a child of hers”. Well, “a friend of the footballer’s” is the same thing! The only time you drop the double
possessive is when, instead of being involved with an animate being, you are “a lover of the British Museum”, because obviously the British Museum does not – and never can – love you back.

  We may all be getting a little sick and tired of the apostrophe by now, so I’ll just get a couple more things off my chest.

  1 Someone wrote to say that my use of “one’s” was wrong (“a common error”), and that it should be ones. This is such rubbish that I refuse to argue about it. Go and tell Virginia Woolf it should be A Room of Ones Own and see how far you get.

  2 To reiterate, if you can replace the word with “it is” or “it has”, then the word is it’s:

  It’s a long way to Tipperary.

  If you can replace the word with “who is” or “who has”, then the word is who’s:

  Who’s that knocking at my door?

  If you can replace the word with “they are”, then the word is they’re:

  They’re not going to get away with this.

  And if you can replace the word with “there is”, the word is there’s:

  There’s a surprising amount about the apostrophe in this book.

  If you can replace the word with “you are”, then the word is you’re:

  You’re never going to forget the difference between “its” and “it’s”.

  We may curse our bad luck that it’s sounds like its; who’s sounds like whose; they’re sounds like their (and there); there’s sounds like theirs; and you’re sounds like your. But if we are grown-ups who have been through full-time education, we have no excuse for muddling them up.

  This chapter is nearing its end.

  Whose book is this, again?

  Some of their suggestions were outrageous!

  This is no concern of theirs!

  Your friend Elton John has been talking about you again.

  In Beachcomber’s hilarious columns about the Apostropher Royal in The Express, a certain perversely comforting law is often reiterated: the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: “For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an its.” Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall.

  The only illiteracy with apostrophes that stirs any sympathy in me is the greengrocer’s variety. First, because greengrocers are self-evidently horny-thumbed people who do not live by words. And second, because I agree with them that something rather troubling and unsatisfactory happens to words ending in vowels when you just plonk an “s” on the end. Take the word “bananas”: at first glance, you might suppose that the last syllable is pronounced “ass”. How can the word “banana” keep its pronunciation when pluralised? Well, you could stick an apostrophe before the “s”! Obviously there is no excuse for not knowing “potatoes” is the plural of “potato”, but if you were just to put an “s” after it, the impulse to separate it from the “o” with some mark or other would be pretty compelling, because “potatos” would be pronounced, surely, “pot-at-oss”.

  Moreover, what many people don’t know, as they fulminate against ignorant greengrocers, is that until the 19th century this was one of the legitimate uses of the apostrophe: to separate a plural “s” from a foreign word ending in a vowel, and thus prevent confusion about pronunciation. Thus, you would see in an 18th-century text folio’s or quarto’s – and it looks rather elegant. I just wish a different mark had been employed (or even invented) for the purpose, to take the strain off our long-suffering little friend; and I hear, in fact, that there are moves afoot among certain punctuation visionaries to revive the practice using the tilde (the Spanish accent we all have on our keyboards which looks like this: ). Thus: quartos and folio~s, not to mention logo~s, pasta~s, ouzo~s and banana~s. For the time being, however, the guardians of usage frown very deeply on anyone writing “quarto’s”. As Professor Loreto Todd tartly remarks in her excellent Cassell’s Guide to Punctuation (1995), “This usage was correct once, just as it was once considered correct to drink tea from a saucer.”

  It would be nice if one day the number of apostrophes properly placed in it’s equalled exactly the number of apostrophes properly omitted from its, instead of the other way round. In the meantime, what can be done by those of us sickened by the state of apostrophe abuse? First, we must refute the label “dinosaurs” (I really hate that). And second, we must take up arms. Here are the weapons required in the apostrophe war (stop when you start to feel uncomfortable):

  correction fluid

  big pens

  stickers cut in a variety of sizes, both plain (for sticking over unwanted apostrophes)

  and coloured (for inserting where apostrophes are needed)

  tin of paint with big brush

  guerrilla-style clothing

  strong medication for personality disorder

  loudhailer

  gun

  Evidently there used to be a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come in to complain, and he would then talk them into buying something. Well, he would be ill-advised to repeat this ploy once my punctuation vigilantes are on the loose. We lovers of the apostrophe will not stand by and let it be abolished – not because we are dinosaurs who drink tea out of saucers (interesting image) but because we appreciate the way the apostrophe has for centuries graced our words and illuminated our meaning. It is no fault of the apostrophe that some of our words need so much help identifying themselves. Indeed, it is to the credit of the apostrophe that it can manage the task. Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended. The next day after the abolition of the apostrophe, imagine the scene. Triumphant abolitionist sits down to write, “Goodbye to the Apostrophe: we’re not missing you a bit!” and finds that he can’t. Abolish the apostrophe and it will be necessary, before the hour is up, to reinvent it.

  *

  That’ll Do, Comma

  When the humorist James Thurber was writing for New Yorker editor Harold Ross in the 1930s and 1940s, the two men often had very strong words about commas. It is pleasant to picture the scene: two hard-drinking alpha males in serious trilbies smacking a big desk and barking at each other over the niceties of punctuation. According to Thurber’s account of the matter (in The Years with Ross [1959]), Ross’s “clarification complex” tended to run somewhat to the extreme: he seemed to believe there was no limit to the amount of clarification you could achieve if you just kept adding commas. Thurber, by self-appointed virtuous contrast, saw commas as so many upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability. And so they endlessly disagreed. If Ross were to write “red, white, and blue” with the maximum number of commas, Thurber would defiantly state a preference for “red white and blue” with none at all, on the provocative grounds that “all those commas make the flag seem rained on. They give it a furled look.”

  If you want to know about editorial “commaphilia” as a source of chronic antagonism, read The Years with Ross. Thurber once went so far as to send Ross a few typed lines of one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, repunctuated in New Yorker style:

  She lived, alone, and few could know

  When Lucy ceased to be,

  But, she is in her grave, and, oh,

  The difference, to me.

  But Ross, it seems, was unmoved by sarcasm, and in the end Thurber simply had to resign himself to Ross’s way of thinking. After all, he was the boss; he signed the cheques; and of course he was a brilliant editor, who endearingly admitted once in a letter to H. L. Mencken, “We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here, probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don’t know how to get it under control.” And so the comma proliferated. Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After
dinner, the men went into the living-room?” And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

  Why the problem? Why the scope for such differences of opinion? Aren’t there rules for the comma, just as there are rules for the apostrophe? Well, yes; but you will be entertained to discover that there is a significant complication in the case of the comma. More than any other mark, the comma draws our attention to the mixed origins of modern punctuation, and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions:

  1 To illuminate the grammar of a sentence

  2 To point up – rather in the manner of musical notation – such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow

  This is why grown men have knock-down fights over the comma in editorial offices: because these two roles of punctuation sometimes collide head-on – indeed, where the comma is concerned, they do it all the time. In 1582, Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie (an early English grammar) described the comma as “a small crooked point, which in writing followeth some small branch of the sentence, & in reading warneth vs to rest there, & to help our breth a little”. Many subsequent grammars of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries make the same distinction. When Ross and Thurber were threatening each other with ashtrays over the correct way to render the star-spangled banner, they were reflecting a deep dichotomy in punctuation that had been around and niggling people for over four hundred years. On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.

  If only we hadn’t started reading quietly to ourselves. Things were so simple at the start, before grammar came along and ruined things. The earliest known punctuation – credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (librarian at Alexandria) around 200 BC – was a three-part system of dramatic notation (involving single points at different heights on the line) advising actors when to breathe in preparation for a long bit, or a not-so-long bit, or a relatively short bit. And that’s all there was to it. A comma, at that time, was the name of the relatively short bit (the word means in Greek “a piece cut off”); and in fact when the word “comma” was adopted into English in the 16th century, it still referred to a discrete, separable group of words rather than the friendly little tadpoley number-nine dot-with-a-tail that today we know and love. For a millennium and a half, punctuation’s purpose was to guide actors, chanters and readers-aloud through stretches of manuscript, indicating the pauses, accentuating matters of sense and sound, and leaving syntax mostly to look after itself. St Jerome, who translated the Bible in the 4th century, introduced a system of punctuation of religious texts per cola et commata (“by phrases”), to aid accurate pausing when reading aloud. Cassiodorus, writing in the 6th century in southern Italy for the guidance of trainee scribes, included punctuation in his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum, recommending “clear pausing in well-regulated delivery”. I do hope Harold Pinter knows about all this, by the way; who would have thought the pause had such a long and significant history?