Apostrophe Catastrophe, pt. 2

Words are insufficient to express how much I detest this sort of thing:

Not the ’70s per se, but rather the typographical dumbness and/or inexcusable laziness inherent in having the apostrophe in such instances going the wrong way.

For once, uncomfortably, I have to put myself among the Blame the Computer crowd. Specifically, I blame “helpful” applications that insert legitimate quotation marks and apostrophes into our sentences. That and dumbness and laziness (see above).

For the most part, I appreciate having " and " turned into “ and ”, but the problem arises when the program gets to ' and ’. See, Word, PhotoShop, InDesign, etc., don't know an apostrophe from a single quote mark. So it looks for cues from the structure of a sentence. If it guesses that the user wants single quotes around a sentence, or a word or words within a sentence, it will correctly produce something like this:

“The quick brown fox jumps over the ‘lazy’ dog.”

Good enough. Likewise, when the program detects a single quote mark within a word, it correctly deduces an apostrophe is the order of the day:

“The quick brown fox’s kits jump over the ‘lazy’ dog.”

But things go entirely off the rails when those sentence cues don’t hold. For instance, a couple of paragraphs ago, when I wrote “ and ” ? I had to go back and make sure the second quotation mark curved the right direction. Good ol’ Microsoft Word wanted to give me “ and “ … because the space after and made the program thing it was the beginning of a sentence, phrase, or word. It gave me the right quotation mark, but in the wrong context.

And when I wrote good ol’ Microsoft Word back there? Word correctly determined that I needed an apostrophe in ol’, since it indicates a missing letter, and delivered the goods. But it—and nearly any other program you’d care to name—gives out entirely when it comes to something like Welcome to the ’70s. It’s the space in front of ’70s that throws it, making it think that a single quote mark is needed rather than an apostrophe. And it delivers the wrong goods.

The fix is really very easy: You type ‘’70s --> , and then go back and delete the --> ‘. Alas, computers have convinced a great many people that anyone who can use turn one on is a writer, editor, designer, typographer, you name it, and so a great many people who don’t know the difference between ‘ and ’ – and are too ignorant to know they don’t know – are misusing left-hand single quote marks as apostrophes. Luckily, it’s almost certain that a majority of their readers or viewers don’t know the difference either. But for those of us who do…nails on a blackboard.

That said: Kudos to the designer of the image above, or a semi-astute editor or art director, for not sticking an apostrophe before the s in ’70s. If ‘70s is like nails on a blackboard, ‘70’s would be like an icepick in the ear.

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Apostrophe Catastrophe

But of course! When “its” actually needs the apostrophe, that’s the one time it gets written without one! Shee-it.

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It Makes a Difference

From time to time I will encounter the bizarre attitude that, somehow, spelling, punctuation, usage, word choice—you know, all that technical, grammar-Nazi stuff—“doesn’t matter.” Translation: “I don’t understand such things, so the armor I put on is to say it doesn’t matter.” 

In fact, it does. 

As I have expressed to more than one client—and, once, to an alleged editor!—such supposed trivia may well go unnoticed by 98.6% of readers, but the flip side is that it will be noticed by 1.4% of readers. And simple mathematics tells us that the bigger the total number of readers, the greater that 1.4% will be in actual numbers of readers. That 1.4% could be 100,000 readers. (We should be so lucky.) 

More disturbing: You have no way of knowing who those 1.4% are. Nobody does. You have no way of knowing their personalities, their threshold of tolerance of sloppy (or nonexistent) editing. For every one who might just shake his or her head and plunge on ahead, you could have one or two who give up, close the book (real or virtual) or web page, and never come back. 

Simply because, as the meme has it, you don’t know the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit. And you don’t like “grammar Nazis,” so you shut down the person who could help you. 

I pause to reflect on these things because a few minutes ago I started to read an article that I had bookmarked earlier. The topic sounded interesting—writing a sales page for book promotion—and maybe the article contained some useful information; I’ll never know, because when I came to the second error in as many paragraphs, I stopped reading. Sure, I could simply have tut-tutted and kept going. Heaven knows I’ve done that more often than I’d care to count. But today I didn’t feel like it. The obvious sloppiness of the article caused me to doubt that its author really had anything worth saying. If she had, she would have taken a few minutes to proof the article, see that here she had used it’s when she wanted its, there she wanted the word’s noun and not the verb form, and so on. 

I would have been more forgiving had the article been a blog post about, I dunno, politics, or food, or movies, or any number of other things. But when your article purports to be educating about the finer points of writing and publishing, you had bloody well better proofread the damn thing before you publish it. 

Or find a grammar Nazi to do it for you. 

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Surveying the Surveys

Occasionally I enjoy taking online surveys. I don't consider them terribly significant--by their very nature, they are not scientific, although I'm not sure that's all that important when it comes to product or lifestyle questions--but some of them can be interesting enough, and most of them feature some kind of point-earning scheme or enter you into a drawing that you'll never win, which makes it fun. Sort of. Beats playing solitaire, mostly.

But having written more than a few surveys in my time, I'm often amazed at the poor writing, illogical questions, and just plain sloppiness that often makes it through to the respondent. I can only conclude that the proofreading department at some of these research companies has been downsized out of existence. And that they don't have a handful of volunteers take the survey before they unleash it on the public.

I've written of this before (Survey says huhn??,), when a survey dated 10/8/08 asked me if I felt "the new president's administration is doing enough to fight unemployment?" Note that 10/8/10 was nearly a full month before the 2008 election (11/4/08) and more than three months before the inauguration. There was no "new president" in October 2008!

I pointed that out to Harris Interactive, and never received a reply.

Which is why I won't bother to share these survey oddities with the various companies that perpetrated them. But I will share them with you!

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This snippet is from a longish "lifestyle" survey that I took a few weeks back:

The problem is one of consistency. The only "abstinence" answer option given is "I do not smoke," but three of the five products it asks about are "smokeless" products. Since the question is about "tobacco products" and not smoking, a more properly worded option would have been "I do not use tobacco products."

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This snippet is from a customer-satisfaction survey following my recent stay at a Day's Inn:

The problem here is dumbness. Sorry, but I have grown weary of supposedly professionally produced publications, signs, and, yes, surveys whose creators can't be bothered to educate themselves about the difference between it's (a contraction, usually for it is and occasionally for it has) and its (a possessive pronoun indicating belonging, as in Every dog must have its day). I used to be more patient about such things, but this is so widespread, and so wrong, and so easy to figure out, that I can no longer do but immediately relegate the perpetrator of such dumbness to the Chowderhead file and move on.

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And finally this, from the same customer-satisfaction survey:

As you see, I did not complete this portion correctly. I foolishly assumed that since I indicated that I had paid my tab with American dollars it was unnecessary to indicate also that I did not pay it with Canadian dollars! What was I thinking?

Seriously, does it make any sense at all for me to have to tell them that my room cost me $90.00 US and $0.00 Canadian? Which, after all, turned out to be the "correct" way to complete that section. Is there any instance in which my stay would have cost me, say, $45.00 American and $46.33 Canadian? Had I completed the section in such a fashion, would anybody on the other end even have noticed?

Given the survey crafters' issues with its and it's, I would assume not.

Good advice in putting together instruments such as surveys (indeed, good advice for any piece of instructional writing): Give it to someone else, someone out of the loop but whose opinion (and, more important, intelligence) you value. If they turn up puzzled, go back to the drawing board. Repeat as necessary.

How Tough Can it Be?

You will say I am sensitive to this burning issue only because my last name ends in an S. And, probably, you will be right. But having spent my entire adult life working with words, much of that time as an editor, all of it as a writer, I have to ask myself:

Why does it seem so freakin’ tough for people to correctly form the plural and/or possessive form of names ending in S??

It is so simple. You have one Smith; if you have more than one, you have two Smiths. If something belongs to Smith, you say it is Smith’s. If it belongs to the family, you say it is the Smiths’. It is all so straightforward, no?

Why, then, do people simply fall apart if the proper noun happens to end in an S?

Here’s an example, from yesterday’s edition of the local rag. The reporter on this story is easily the most on-the-ball writer they have down there, and I apologize for that being faint praise. But apparently she suffers the same malady that afflicts so many, and suffers also from having no good editor to help her out.

Experienced couple to lead Salvation Army
By Jill Callison
jcalliso@argusleader.com

Published: June 21, 2007

A couple with long ties to the Salvation Army have been chosen to lead the local church.

Majors Michael and Judith Mills have been ordained ministers for more than 30 years, but their ties to the Salvation Army go back longer than that.

"We're really products of what the Salvation Army can do to help individuals," Major Michael Mills said.

"My father was a recovering alcoholic. The Salvation Army helped him change his life, and we started going to church as a family. My wife was in a foster home out in South Dakota, and she started going to the Salvation Army there."

Judith Mills was raised in Rapid City and Aberdeen.

The Mills will replace Majors Paul and Mary Duskin, who have been assigned to the Eastern Michigan and Divisional Headquarters in Detroit.

Okay—catch that? The family name is apparently Mills, with an S, not Mill. And yet in that last paragraph, when they are being referred to in the plural, they are called “the Mills.”

No, no no. The Millses. One Mills; two Millses.

I’m sorry if that “sounds wrong.” No one said this was going to be pretty.

But it is straightforward. It’s every bit as straightforward as our Smith example. One Reynolds, two Reynoldses. Reynolds’s house; the Reynoldses’ house.

Several years ago I was a panelist at a writer’s convention. A woman in the audience asked a question about this very subject—how to properly for the possessive and/or plural form of names ending in S. One of my co-panelists—a well-regarded writer whose name you would recognize were I to provide it (a name that does not end in S, by the way, which is telling), and a woman who was and perhaps still is teaching English at a U.S. college, which also is telling—in all seriousness advised the questioner to avoid using names that end in S, since she herself couldn’t figure out how to keep it straight.

Ow.

I had a similar unsettling incident a few weeks ago, teaching a writing class at a local college. In that instance, I was commenting to my class on the gender-sensitive case, which they pretty much all seemed to have trouble with. I shared my (correct) opinion that, although it’s awkward, the proper form is to write Everyone must bring his or her book (rather than Everyone must bring their book, which is how my students were crafting such sentences), upon which one of the better students (in a group of really good students, it must be said) informed me that she had once raised the issue with another instructor in the English department (a member of the permanent staff, who had advanced degrees and letters after his or her name and everything), whose sage advice was to just go ahead and use their.

Ow, again.

I am reminded of my third-grade teacher, Sister Hildegund, a lovely old woman…but, alas, a very old woman, and one who should have been retired some years earlier (she literally would fall asleep at her desk during class, the poor thing). At a parent conference, she informed my folks that she didn’t understand “the new math” (as it was known in the 1960s)…and so simply did not teach it.

Ow, ow, ow.

The benefit of learning how to do something the proper way, as opposed to throwing up one’s hands in defeat and announcing that he or she “doesn’t get it,” is that once you do get it…you’ve got it, for good! Nothing is gained—no one progresses—by taking the attitude that, well, since everyone is doing it wrong we’ll just do it wrong, and sooner or later it will be right. (Obviously, that’s where we’re going with who and whom, and I have felt for some years that by the middle of this century, at the latest, all but the most hidebound of grammarians will be insisting upon the distinction. That’s fine—the language is, after all, a living and always-evolving thing—but until that time, there is a difference, and it does matter.)

And don’t even get me started on those signs people have on or in front of their houses—or, sometimes, on their RVs—telling one and all that they are The Anderson’s…or The Jone’s…