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There’s a society dedicated to its preservation and Nottingham City Council declared war on its misuse. But why is the apostrophe such a problem? Louise Birkett takes a look.

Misuse of apostrophes is something that tends to make me grit my teeth or mutter things like ‘it’s a plural, so it goes after the s – fool!’. I don’t think anyone’s ever crossed the road to avoid me, but I probably have a reputation in my local town as something of a madwoman.

You see, the rules governing apostrophes aren’t difficult yet people automatically go down the hokey cokey route of ‘if in doubt leave it out’ – or put it in.

So, here’s a simple guide to what is really a very useful piece of punctuation:

Apostrophes have two uses:

• To indicate when a letter, letters or word have been left out of a phrase
• To signify ownership (the genitive case if you want the technical term).
  

Contrary to what a lot of greengrocers seem to think, they are NOT used to denote plurals.

It’s really that simple. Take a look at that sentence – there is an apostrophe in it’s because it’s short for ‘it is’. So, the apostrophe in one o’clock indicates it’s short for ‘one of the clock’; isn’t is short for ‘is not’ and so on.

Using the apostrophe to denote possession is also easy. I have two dogs, so it’s impossible to move in my house without tripping over their toys. However, squeaky toys belong to only one dog, while tennis balls belong to both. Saying that in the genitive case means:

• The dog’s squeaky toys – apostrophe before the ‘s’ because I’m only talking about one dog
• The dogs’ tennis balls – apostrophe after the ‘s’ because the tennis balls belong to more than one dog.

As you would expect with English, there are exceptions to be aware of…

Collective nouns such as children and people are treated as singular, so the apostrophe comes before the ‘s’, for example ‘the children’s toys’

It’s only ever includes an apostrophe when it is short for ‘it is’. So, if you use the Reuter’s guidelines when talking about the dog and refer to ‘its toys’ there is no apostrophe to show possession. Other possessive pronouns such as theirs, ours, hers and yours also don’t require an apostrophe.

Most proper nouns take apostrophe ‘s’, for example ‘St Francis’s Church’ but traditionally there are certain exceptions such as ‘Jesus’ sake’, ‘Achilles’ heel’ and ‘for goodness’ sake’

When writing place names, the safest thing to do is consult a map – King’s Lynn and Land’s End take the apostrophe, St Albans and St Ives don’t.