The Tractable Apostrophe

Source: Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Job 1: It indicates a possessive in a singular noun: The boy’s hat

Job 2: It indicates time or quantity: Two weeks’ notice. Hmm pardon me but I never did know there was an error in it.

Job 3: It indicates omission of figures in dates: The summer of’68

Job 4: It indicates the omission of letters: We can’t go to Jo’burg (Probably when you don’t know how to spell Johannesburg)
Most famous example is the word “it’s”:
It’s your turn (it is your turn)
It’s got very cold (it has got very cold)

Job 5: It indicates strange, non-standard English: Appen yer’d better’ave this key…..

Job 6: It features in Irish names such as O’Neill and O’Casey (The “O” in Irish names is an anglicisation of “ua”, meaning grandson

Job 7: It indicates the plurals of letters: How many f’s are there in Fulham?

Job 8: It also indicates plurals of words: What are the do’s and don’t’s?

And the reason I chose to highlight the jobs of an apostrophe is due to the fact that in French, there is no apostrophe. (Thank goodness?). Thus the children’s game in French is Le jeu des enfants which means “the game of the children”. *Smack* Sounds interesting.

Hope to finish the book by this weekend although I must say this book is not for me as I commit practically all the felonies the author described and detected. The author also mentioned that native English speaker rarely pick a book on proper English usage, only the foreigners will do so. Hmm maybe, maybe not. Indeed I don’t want to learn French well and yet have a poor command of English. But then I doubt such scenario will happen either… I most probably fare poorly in both French and English. Because till now, I am still having problem rattling the numbers in French … eeks.. so tough!

I shall end the post with the joke (from which the book title came about?)… Adieu!

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large, black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”