Nezuko's Rat's Nest

October September 24 is was National Punctuation Day, or so says Sylvia. Who am I to doubt? To (belatedly) honor the day, I suggest you make a vow to use apostrophes correctly in possessives and contractions, observing the tricky intersection of the two in the well-known it’s/its conundrum*, plural possessives**, and possessives of words and names that end in S***.

If you're feeling even more fervent, you could try using correctly typeset quotation marks and apostrophes, “like this” and ‘this’. You could even get fancier and use proper em dashes (—) and ellipses (…) though that takes looking up the codes or playing around with your keyboard until you find them. And really, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to put correct curly quotes in. Unless I’m typesetting something for print, I usually don’t bother.

Now if only I could convince sign makers that quotation marks do not give emphasis so much as lend irony. There’s a service station near me that has a sign: We “now” offer smog checks! Which of course begs the question, what exactly are they being ironic about? An ironic now is an interesting thing: do they really mean perhaps in the indefinite past or future? Never?

It probably says something worrisome about me that this bugs me as much as it does.

Happy Punctuation Day! Only a month late…

*It’s/its conundrum: it is or it has = it’s; belonging to it = its.
You can remember this rule more easily, perhaps, if you consider that other pronoun-based possessives such as his, hers, theirs, and ours also do not take an apostrophe.

**Singular vs. plural possessives: a single cow’s calf; multiple cows’ calves

***Possessives from names that end in S: Hades is the Greek god of the dead. Hades’s domain is the underworld. (It is also considered correct to drop the final S, and say Hades’ domain, but I have a preference for using the duplicated S.)