Wednesday Word Nerd: To apostrophe, or not to apostrophe

At a certain greasy spoon in my hometown, a hand-written menu advertised “French Frie’s.” It irritated me so much that eventually I had to stop going in (thank goodness they had a drive-thru). The unfortunate menu-writer fell victim to a common misconception – that, if you’ve got an “s” on the end of a word, then you also need an apostrophe.

Well, you don’t. When you make a word plural by adding that “s,” you don’t need an apostrophe at all. When you add an “s” to a verb (“Sara spends way too much time blogging”), you don’t need an apostrophe either.

Apostrophes do a lot of things in the English language. In the most common usage, the apostrophe indicates a possessive – that something belongs to the person or thing in question. Examples: Sara’s blog, Kathy’s house, the president’s speech. The only way that menu would’ve been correct would be if we spelled “fry” as “frie” (we don’t) and if that frie owned something.

So, what do you do when the possessive word already ends with an “s”? Here’s where it gets tricky. The simplest rule is that you should just add the apostrophe and an “s” (“Congress’s bill”), but there’s some dispute there. Many people will add the apostrophe, but not the “s,” if the word ends with either “-es” or “-is” (“Doris’ car,” but “Congress’s bill”). It’s not incorrect, but you may find the first way simpler.

(The grammar Bible Strunk &White says to give everything an apostrophe + “s”, but use apostrophe-and-no-“s” with "ancient proper nouns" such as “Jesus’ disciples”… but, really, who the hell can keep up with that? Like I need to be debating whether something is an "ancient" noun according to two dead English majors along with everything else I’ve got to manage. And why do S&W think Jesus is a proper noun, but James isn’t, anyway? Seriously, let's not stress.)

For plural nouns that don’t end in “s,” add the apostrophe and “s” (“The children’s playground” – A playground belonging to many children). And what about plural nouns that do end in “s”? More trickiness: here you use only an apostrophe with no “s” (“My friends’ house”). This indicates that more than one friend possesses the house. If you’re only talking about one friend, then it’s “My friend’s house.”

As you can imagine, sometimes these rules can result in some pretty wacky sentence constructions (“Quentin Tarantino’s movies’ violence…”). Much of the time you can re-work the sentence so that it’s easier to understand (“The violence in Quentin Tarantino’s movies…”).

Next time: its vs. it’s