i hereby call this meeting of nit-pickers anonymous to order. today we will deal with the apostrophe, which you might say at first glance is as small a nit as can be picked. but let me suggest to you that even though the apostrophe is a tiny little mark on the page, it`s use and misuse??make that its use and misuse--can lead to much head-scratching and irritation.you say this problem doesn`t concern you. you say you know the in`s and out`s, the why`s and wherefore`s, of apostrophic etiquette. or should that be ins, outs, whys, wherefores? yes i think it should, although ins looks pretty strange on the page. and if ins looks strange, what about yeses and noes or hes and shes or ps and qs? or should that be p`s and q`s? yes, it should, according to the style i`m forced to follow at the globe and mail.
caught your attention? i didn`t think so. it`s??right one, this time??hard to interest anyone in apostrophes. they`re easy, people say, or they don`t matter. you`d`ve thought folks`re smarter than that. it`s thinking like this that has given us ads proclaiming "potatoe`s??49/o(,/) a kilo" or signs warning "auto`s parked illegally may be tagged and towed" or rock critics plugging guns `n roses. nits these may be, but the world is lousy with them.
the problem with explaining apostrophes--apart from the fact that nobody takes them too seriously--is that they cannot be made systematic. we say tom`s and his the same way, and by that final s we mean the same thing, possession or belonging. but one carries an apostrophe and the other doesn`t. the word his is the older form, and shows us the possessive as our ancestors used to deal with it. his is the genitive, or possessive, form of the pronoun he, and nouns in english that indicated this gr