Emma Watson’s apostrophe slip
With thanks to The Times columnist Carol Midgley for bringing this delightful anecdote to my attention, spare a thought for the actress and English Literature graduate Emma Watson this morning. In her rush to support the Time’s Up movement she hastily got a (thankfully temporary) tattoo, which she proudly unveiled at the Vanity Fair Oscars party. The only problem is, having overlooked the all-important apostrophe, it read “Times up”, which means nothing at all.
On realising her mistake, she tweeted a mea culpa: “Fake tattoo proofreading position available. Experience with apostrophes a must.”
Don’t be like Emma Watson. No, not the £14 million net worth, multi-award-winning bit – obviously that’s ok. I’m talking about not knowing how to use apostrophes correctly, even, shockingly, after graduating with a degree in English from the Ivy League Brown University.
Once you realise that there are only two possible uses for apostrophes, using them properly is child’s play (see what I did there?). One use is to show ownership of something – a possessive apostrophe – as in “Mel’s blog”. The other purpose is to denote a letter (or letters) left out of a word – the contraction or abbreviation apostrophe. For instance:
“Poor grammar doesn’t help you create a professional image.”
Here, an abbreviation apostrophe has been used to represent a missing word – in this case, ‘not’.
Compare it with this example of a possessive apostrophe:
“Many believe a company’s carelessness over spelling and grammar could reflect a lack of attention to detail in other areas.”
It’s true that things can get slightly more complicated with words and names that already end in an ‘s’ but for a singular word ending in ‘s’ we just add ‘apostrophe s’ – as in “the boss’s complaint”. And for plurals ending in ‘s’ we need only add an apostrophe after the ‘s’, as in this example:
“Our clients’ marketing communications inspire confidence.”
If you have a spelling, grammar or writing query you’d like answered, let me know and I’ll tackle it next time!
