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Make Apostrophe’s Great Again!
We’ve spent the last many years being told that we can’t believe our eyes or our ears, that we must be very careful how we speak and what we say, so as not to offend. That men can be women, that women can be men, that unwelcome words are literal violence, and that singular hes and shes–if any of them chooses so to be–must be referred to by made-up words such as “ze” or “zir,” or even by the plural pronoun “they.” This calculated and deliberate incoherence makes it virtually impossible for even–or perhaps especially–native speakers of English to discern anything useful about a person who’s under discussion by–for example–a police chief who is asking the public for information on a “person of interest” in the commission of a crime, but who really can’t say much, if anything, to narrow down the potential pool of suspects, or tell people what sorts of things to look for (race, sex, size, etc.) for fear of stepping on a woke landmine. And it explains much of the rhetorical calisthenics regularly on display when it comes to things like defining the term “woman;” whether biological men can be woman enough to hang out in girls’ locker rooms; and whether or not men who’ve been convicted of crimes of violence against women (and others too for that matter) should be housed in women’s prisons, even if the epiphany as to their “real” gender only occurred until after their conviction. (I don’t know how prevalent this last sort of thing is in the United States; it seems to be fairly common in the UK.)
The arc of the linguistic universe, when it comes to English, seems to be bending to the illiterate, the moronic, and the increasingly vague.
Even above and beyond that, I think it’s bending to the damaging.
I think that–actually–the most important thing we’ve learned is that the basic sender <–> receiver communication paradigm, in which both ends of the process were valued equally, in which both agreed on an established underlying set of protocols which generally led to understanding, and in which both parties learned to take into account helpful signals such as tone and context, and learned to subtract bothersome signals such as noise, have been upended.
Yesterday, all that mattered was what the “receiver” thought of the communication. The intent of the “sender,” no matter how pure, whether excellently or clumsily expressed, mattered not, and was often under deep suspicion from the get-go… especially if the sender was of a particular race, class, religion, or if he or she belonged to some other “oppressor” group. (Look no further than that chart, a couple of years ago, from the Smithsonian about how characteristics such as precision, hard work, planning for the future, etc. were “White” characteristics, whose value (in what appeared to me to be a very racist proposition) the Smithsonian appeared to think that–no matter how useful they may have been when it came to societal advancement–those who were not “White” could not possibly comprehend or accomplish.
But, never mind! It’s all different now! It’s not that we can’t believe our eyes and ears anymore (because we still can’t). But, phooey on the “receiver!” Now, it’s all about what the “sender” meant!
Yesterday, in one of his signature “step on her moment” moves, when it comes to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Joe–in a Zoom call with a Latino outreach outfit–said the following:
I heard what I heard. Sure sounds like Joe is demeaning Trump supporters as “garbage.” And that’s how Trump, and most senior Republicans, and many–many–ordinary people took it. Trust me: I was in a Walmart parking lot a couple of hours ago, and I’ve never heard anything like it.
Given the rules of engagement of the last couple of decades, I think the “receivers” get to define the message and shout their offense. It’s not even particularly surprising, given Biden’s previous comments on the “MAGA crowd,” his blood-red “soul of a nation” speech, and his and Kamala’s history of associating Trump and his followers with the worst of humanity; not to mention Obama’s “bitter clingers” remarks, and Hillary’s “deplorables” comments. Here’s a walk down memory lane when it comes to the latter:
You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.
So it’s not super-hard to move from those words (in 2016, a couple of months before that year’s election), in which Hillary explicitly consigned 25% of the US population into the garbage pile, to Biden’s copycat words in 2024 when he’s done nothing but (literally) double down on half the country.
Ugh.
I’m amused to watch the damage control. Most of it, hilariously, seems to center on the apostrophe, a punctuation mark whose correct use, I’m pretty sure, is unknown to most folks born after about 1980. (I haven’t done all the scientific research, but–to quote Kamala Harris–“I have studied the maps.” Which, in this case, constitute an awful lot of written material, most of it not even online.)
Earth to Millennials and following: The thing about apostrophes is that you can’t actually “see” them in spoken words. So when someone called “Franklin Leonard,” on CNN makes excuses for Biden’s stutter and says that–as a fellow former stutterer himself–“It’s very obvious to me that there’s an apostrophe at the end of “supporters” there,” I am very quick to cry “foul.”
No Franklin. I don’t care how good you are. You can’t “see” an apostrophe in the spoken word.
Of course, the media is doing its bit, when it comes to butt-covering. Other iterations of the video posted above include some variant of closed-captioning, which is impossible to remove and include (under what authority I’m not sure) the supposedly damaging apostrophe in the text. (I think that might be more effective if I actually believed that most people viewing it were sensitive to the “singular possessive” meaning of the same. I actually suspect it’s lost on most of them. LOL.)
Some “round-tables” start snappishly with the assertion that “Joe Biden isn’t running for President.” It’s as if he were a nonentity rather than the Sitting President of the United States. Or as if he’s irrelevant and shoved to the sidelines because he’s no longer in the game. (I can’t help including this comment from a Biden official (speaking off the record) WRT Biden’s recent remark that “we gotta lock [Trump] up”:
For better or worse, no one is listening to him anymore and his words have little power and less reach. It’s a blip. Gone in any meaningful way by mid-day tomorrow.
Glory be. Ayatollah Mohammed Whatsit Mohammed, call your office. Apparently there’s a vacancy at the top.
But here’s the relevant question for this most recent matter and the subject of this post: Was Joe Biden reading from the teleprompter? If he was–and if the person who wrote his remarks as they should have been delivered wasn’t an utter cretin, then Biden’s remarks went horribly wrong, and perhaps he shouldn’t be POTUS anymore. If he wasn’t reading from the teleprompter, and he was speaking for himself, then what he said is unforgivable, and he shouldn’t be POTUS anymore.
Either way, he loses. Not because he offended the people who received his message. But because he’s spent a lifetime honing that rotten and nasty message, and–irrespective of his attempts to wriggle out of accountability for it, it’s actually time for him to pay.
PS: Pedant Alert: There’s a grammatical solecism in the title of this post. No need to bring it to my attention: I already know. Just cast a wry smile and move on.
Published in General
I’ve always found apostrophes to be silent. Think I’m not alone.
Great post, She. I share your low opinion of the doddering old fool who is currently our President — and of his party.
It is my understanding that across the pond, on that troubled little island from which you hail, it is the done thing to place full stops and commas after closing quotation marks. I appreciate that, having adopted my own country as yours, you now subscribe to the local convention of placing such punctuation within the quotations where, however unintuitive it may seem, they rightly belong.
Having said that, it is my understanding that colons and semicolons should be external to the quoted text.
Yes, like that.
Cheers!
DJT boards garbage truck for a ride upon arriving today in Wisconsin.
The CNN people were seething that they had to cover Trump answering questions from that truck which means the apostrophe narrative will not make the gaffe go disappear on schedule. Trump seems to be having fun, the real joy candidate in the race.
She, I was ready to give your post a like just for the title. The post itself deserves a like on its own.
Also, it reminds me of a scene from Start the Revolution Without Me.
And here I was still coming to grips with the fact that since I went to a Knicks/Bulls game at the Garden, I must be a Nazi too. Or maybe Jordan was the Nazi, or Ewing. One of the three of us must have been. But now that it turns out that I’m garbage, I can quit worrying about it.
Garbage and the Garden go way back.
For all his faults, and only a zealot could ignore them, DJT really does love America in the same way Reagan did. He wants everyone to be as successful as himself. He should do a working man thing every day til election. Perhaps Mike Rowe could host?
The lady with the pronoun as her nom de plume for the linguistic victory!
She was She well before the pronoun Gestapo was making its malign presence felt.
I’m with you and the troubled little island’s residents. Periods and colons end completed clauses. So logically they can only appear at the end of completed clauses. End-quotes end quotes. So they can’t end clauses that contain them.
H. Rider Haggard trademark. Gutenberg.
The garbage truck arrival was the piece de resistance!! Oh my goodness! Talk about joy…DJT knows how to do it. (I have to go catch my breath now.)
I don’t see anything wrong with the grammar or punctuation of the title. You are simply urging that which belongs to Apostrophe to be great again. It’s like saying:
Make Steven’s Great Again!
It’s another way of saying “Make Steven’s (shoes, comments, artwork, or whatever) great again!” It makes sense to me. I’ve learned this lesson by reading the pedantic left-wing defenses of Joe Biden.
democracy dies with a misplaced apostrophe
https://twitchy.com/brettt/2024/10/30/wapo-joe-bidens-garbage-defense-is-entirely-plausible-n240301
Not sure where you’re coming down on this pressing issue, Mark. I fully endorse the American convention: Periods and commas inside quotation marks, colons and semicolons outside, and question marks and exclamation points in or out depending on context. That’s the American way, and I’ll defend it with the same unbridled enthusiasm with which I defend the Oxford comma.
As I understand it, our cousins across the pond differ from our convention in this regard only in that they put the periods and commas after the closing quotation marks. I qualify that only because I don’t know what the British convention is regarding question marks and exclamation points. It’s possible that they have a hard and fast rule about placement, and don’t allow them to move within or without the quotation marks depending on whether they logically modify the quoted text or the text in which the quotation is embedded, the latter being the way we Yanks do it.
Side Note:
Re solecism…
Because Merriam Webster is a venerable institution that has in my lifetime crumbled more slowly under the assault of the Marxian sappers than most of the Anglophone institutions of truth-seeking, I feel secure in the belief that…
…is not a solecism.
At first glance it seems, to an English-speaker who doesn’t know Greek, that the writer meant to say “one who speaks incorrectly”.
But I decided that the rotting that starts at the top surely can not have gone that far, and that the researcher must really know his Greek.
Ah! My apologies. I meant no disrespect for my fellow Yankees.
I’ve seen both in the UK, increasingly so as time goes on. I expect it’s all due to the malign influence of the “Yanks” who are regularly blamed, in the comments section of the Telegraph, for most societal, and cultural ills–including things like obesity and illiteracy–afflicting the Brits today. (I don’t think it’s quite that simple myself.)
When Auntie Pat died in December, 2022, we decided to put together a booklet of memories from family members and her former pupils at the primary (elementary) schools where she had taught since not long after WWII ended. Many, many, of them stayed in touch with her for the rest of their lives, and she was the recipient of hundreds of Christmas cards each year from all over the world, in whichever parts of it they’d ended up. Because I do such things, I was nominated to put the booklet together. We ended up with 24 pages, and about 30 recollections, one from a pupil who’d been in Pat’s first class more than seventy years before.** The punctuation, WRT the placement of quotation marks, was all over the place, even though only a couple of the contributors were from the US. I eventually standardized on the US convention, which I think looks much tidier, just because it didn’t throw a red marker each time in Corel, indicating that I’d done it wrong, and everyone seemed quite happy.
My favorite memory from the book, and the one I chose to put on the cover, came from that long-ago review when the writer was just five years old: “Miss Muffett is the first teacher I remember–and she just seemed a larger and more cheerful version of my classmates.” How Pat would have laughed.
**Note to self: This reminds me of a lovely article in the Telegraph a few weeks ago written by someone a bit older than myself (I think), about a long-ago teacher who sounded very much like Pat. One of the comments speculated that the reason there were so many very special spinster ladies who devoted themselves to the profession after WWII might have had to do with the fact that many British women had lost their beaus during the war and were looking for a cause to throw themselves into, a thesis that might bear some investigation. It’s at least superficially true of Pat, who lost her “young man” in the War. I’m not sure how far their relationship had progressed, but she never married.
Your family reminiscences are always charming, and sometimes fascinating for the way the evince the old British Empire.
Punctuation
inside: tidy-looking, illogical
Outside: sloppy-looking, logical
”You pays your money,” as they say “,and you takes your chances;” just try to be consistent!”, is what I say.
Consistency is good. “Foolish consistency,” not so much (That’s why I don’t get in too much of a sweat about it, unless it seems that someone is trying to mislead me.)
Thanks. Yes.
(Dad is in the middle.)
The apostrophe in the title is my favorite (or for you should I say “favourite”?) part of the post.
Is he wearing a Fez?
I doubt it. A fez is a cylindrical headdress, with a cord and a tassel on top. I think Dad is wearing something appropriate to his rank in the Colonial Service, higher at the front than the back (not cylindrical) with a badge on the front and no tassel.
I do believe this photo must have been taken on June 1, 1961, when the Northern Cameroons became part of Nigeria. The guy with the feathers on his hat is Sir Percy Wyn Harris who–in another life–found Mallory’s ice axe on Everest in 1933 or so. The other fellow (with the wool wig) is–I think–Derek Mountain.
It looks a little like a US Army garrison cap. I’ve seen the kind he’s wearing before, but apparently the Brits went from tricorn hats to pith helmets as far as Google is concerned.
.