It wasn’t only negligence. There was a genuine uncertainty over how this new punctuation mark was to be used. Sometimes there would be an omission with no apostrophe at all: Will you ha the truth on’t, says the Clown in Hamlet (in the First Folio edition) – not ha’. And a colloquial form of he turns up as a as well as ‘a and a’. We see it used to represent single letters (th’ for the), two letters (’em for them), and even whole words (’faith for in faith, ’sblood for God’s blood).
Writers and typesetters – worried about the possible ambiguity in such a sentence as these are the kings – then began to use the apostrophe to mark the possessive option, but in a very unsure and erratic way. We see far more examples of possessives lacking an apostrophe than showing one. If the noun was a proper name, there is often one present (Gonzago’s wife, Apollo’s temple), but we also see a vacillation even in a single line: Did Romeo’s hand shed Tybalts blood. If the noun wasn’t a name, it would usually be absent, whether animate (schoole-boyes teares) or inanimate (the fields chiefe flower). But a developing sense that apostrophe = possession is evident, not only in nouns but also in pronouns. We see such spellings as her’s, our’s, and it’s.
The typesetters also found the apostrophe a useful solution to unusual or alien-looking words. When Malvolio finds Olivia’s letter in Twelfth Night, we read: these bee her very C’s, her V’s, and her T’s. The plurals of foreign loanwords also attracted them, especially when they ended in a vowel (dilemma’s, stanzo’s), but they were used with native words too, and after consonants as well as vowels (these pardon mee’s; hum’s, and ha’s). It was the beginning of a long association of the apostrophe with plurality.
And an association with the letter s. As both genitives and regular plurals used that letter, it perhaps wasn’t surprising to see Elizabethan typesetters developing something of a Pavlovian response: if a word ends in a vowel + s, then insert an apostrophe. So we see them appearing with present-tense third-person singulars: doe’s, see’s, ha’s. Even sometimes with consonants: me think’s. All the confusions that we’re familiar with in present-day English are found in these early days. If a noun ends in -s, what’s to be done? We see them experimenting with various solutions: omission (Venus doves), expansion (Marses fierie steed), older use (Mars his heart), and insertion – but not always in the right place (Calchas in Troilus and Cressida lives in Calcha’s house).
During the seventeenth century a consensus over some of the uses began to emerge. Quite clearly there could be a problem of comprehension if there was no systematic way of distinguishing between possessives with a singular and a plural noun. Context is sometimes a help, as in these two Shakespearean examples:
the use of following his shows that it’s a singular when King Henry says:
Wilt thou, vpon the high and giddie Mast,
Seale vp the Ship-boyes Eyes, and rock his Braines …
(Henry IV Part 2 3.1.19)
the preceding syntax shows it’s a plural when Coriolanus says:
The smiles of Knaues
Tent in my cheekes, and Schoole-boyes Teares take vp The Glasses of my sight …
(Coriolanus 3.2.116)
But often context is no help, and the pressure to make a systematic distinction grew during the eighteenth century. Lindley Murray, following earlier grammarians, recognizes the two conventions, ’s and s’, so we might think that this would solve the problem once and for all. But there remained doubts. Joseph Priestley in his Rudiments of Grammar (1761) worries about how to distinguish constructions that sound the same, such as the princes injuries, and suggests the best solution is to avoid the problem altogether and write the injuries of princes. And C P Mason’s English Grammar (1876) shows how the idea of elision was still present in people’s minds. He accepts that we need an apostrophe in the singular because it ‘marks that the vowel of the syllabic suffix has been lost’, but he goes on: ‘It is therefore an unmeaning process to put the apostrophe after the plural s (as birds’), because no vowel has been dropped there.’
The situation was made more complicated by the views of spelling reformers, who had become increasingly energetic during the nineteenth century. George Bernard Shaw avoided apostrophes whenever he could, and robustly defended his practice in his ‘Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers’ (1902):
The apostrophes in ain’t, don’t, haven’t, etc. look so ugly that the most careful printing cannot make a page of colloquial dialogue as handsome as a page of classical dialogue. Besides, shan’t should be sha’n’t, if the wretched pedantry of indicating the elision is to be carried out. I have written aint, dont, havnt [sic], shant, shouldnt, and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. I also write thats, whats, lets, for the colloquial forms of that is, what is, let us; and I have not yet been prosecuted.
It’s impossible to say how influential Shaw’s views were, but they do illustrate the large divide between those who found apostrophes an irritation and those who introduced them in all possible places (1920’s, NCO’s, and so on).
The point to note is that, even as late as 150 years ago, experts were still not in agreement over all uses of the apostrophe. Nouns ending in -s continued to be a particular worry: Keats’ poems or Keats’s poems. And people didn’t know what to do with pronouns: theirs or their’s? its or it’s? After all, it was reasoned, if the apostrophe marks possession, then surely it should be used in pronouns as well as nouns? If we have the dog’s bowl, then why not it’s bowl? And if the dogs’ bowl, why not the bowl was their’s?
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, shir
t’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
Making a Point Page 24
