If you know what kind of a thing is a knife, you’re not
going to grab it by the wrong end. How will you slice an onion with the handle?
More to the point, —ouch—, how will you avoid slicing open your own palm with
the blade? Which kind of tears do you want, if any? Knowing how to use a knife
means knowing where and when and how to slice.
Like a knife to an onion, an apostrophe slices a word
wide open. The word didn’t, for
example, precisely indicates where the o
from not was cut, or elided, when the
contraction was produced. The scarred misspelling “did’nt,” in contrast, shows
a sloppy sliver where none was needed.
Sometimes we see an apostrophe that reveals who holds the
dagger, who possesses what: the student’s
sins, the writers’ stabbing. We can even tell how many do the possessing;
in these examples, there is one student, and there are more than one writers. To
the ear, the student’s sins and the students’ sins and maybe even the student sins all sound the same. If
we hear the cut at all, it is only the faint whisper between one s and another as the knife comes
unsheathed. But we can see the cut, and a writer who desires clarity of meaning
should carve with the precision of the surgeon’s scalpel.
And yet ignorance of technique leads us to a strange
reversal in contemporary English, in which people are given to using the handle
for the blade and the blade for the handle, a mangled language of bludgeoned
jack-o’-lanterns and punctured doorbells. It seems more common to see, lately,
bloody botched procedures such as “Davids Pizzas” where “We have dipping
sauce’s.” Plurals don’t need an apostrophe operation any more than pizzas need
plastic surgery. And as for David, well, maybe someone is trying to suggest
that he dispossess his pizzas. Is this just outright confusion, comparable to a
misspelling? Is it the result of dependence on, or ignorance of, software such
as Microsoft Word? Does it all stem from the anxiety of that persistent Sword
of Damocles, the conundrum of “is it it’s
or is it its?” My fearful suspicion
is that all of this random slashing replicates the unfocused thrashing-about of
a seething, unsettled society whose members do not know where or when or how to
show, or to use, their weapons.
Because an apostrophe is most certainly a weapon, and of
the most vastly insidious kind of violence visited upon speakers and readers of
the English language. You, writer—you!—you are complicit in Kennedy’s
assassination when you give it to him like that, for him to possess, as if
anyone wants to possess her or his own murder. This is a
fundamentally unethical form of grammatical viciousness that, for as banal and
accepted as it is, does not stop being a form of violence that affects the way
we think about perpetrators and victims, about crimes and consequences. It is
the lazy ease of slurred syllables—the unburdening of not bothering to locate a
recycling receptacle; the casual, hurtful chuckle at someone else’s
misfortune—that compounds wound over wound and adds up to the death by a
thousand cuts. There is always an alternative way to recast the sentence, to
subvert the strictures of column width or character count, to slice, if at all,
elsewhere: the traitor's crime against the
nation, the assassin’s murder of the millionaire, the bombs’ destruction upon
the city.
The writers’ stabbing is the apostrophe’s purpose. At its
best, it’s the mark of a clear incision, a graceful stroke, a clever slash’s
eye-catching curve. Can you cut it?
