WHAT’S UP WITH THE APOSTROPHE?
THE WORD “APOSTROPHE” GOES BACK to Greek drama. A “strophe,” or “turn,” meant a stanza in a Greek choral ode—the chorus sang and danced in one direction. The strophe was followed by an “antistrophe,” or “turn against,” when the chorus whipped around in the other direction, and sang lyrics in response to the first stanza. “Apostrophe” means “turn from,” and refers to a rhetorical device in which the actor turns from the action and addresses someone or something who is not there. “Apostrophe” still has this meaning in English, and “apostrophize” has become a verb. I first encountered it in The Innocents Abroad, when Mark Twain observes his fellow tourists gawking at Leonardo’s Last Supper, in Milan: “You would think that those men had an astonishing talent for seeing things that had already passed away. It was what I thought when I stood before ‘The Last Supper’ and heard men apostrophizing wonders and beauties and perfections which had faded out of the picture and gone a hundred years before they were born.” From this, I thought “to apostrophize” meant “to praise,” and I honestly can’t tell whether the emphasis is on the rapture of the tourists or on the nonexistence of what they were enraptured by. An apostrophe is almost like a prayer, when a prayer comes from the impulse to praise.
And the apostrophe is going to need our prayers if it is to survive in its approved form. There are real questions about the use of the apostrophe in a possessive. For instance, which side of the s does it go on in “farmer’s market”? I prefer “farmers’ market,” assuming that there is more than one farmer. Some people insist that “hornet’s nest” is the proper form, though there is more than one hornet. I once asked Eleanor Gould how to make the plural possessive of McDonald’s, and she very sensibly told me to leave it alone. “You have to stop somewhere,” she said. We stopped at McDonald’ses’.
And yet commercial enterprises with faulty apostrophes have produced some success stories. Barneys New York, the high-end clothing store, was founded by Barney Pressman, a purveyor of men’s discount clothing, as Barney’s, in 1923; it dropped the apostrophe in 1979, at the behest of Gene Pressman, the grandson of Barney, who introduced a line of very expensive women’s clothing, and the enterprise took off, as copy editors, bereft of the apostrophe and unable to afford the clothes, gnashed their teeth. Gary Comer, a native of Chicago, worked for ten years as a copywriter at Young & Rubicam before dropping out to bum around Europe, where, in the Swiss Alps, he read The Magic Mountain, whose feverish young hero made him contemplate “whether there would be life after 33, and what it might consist of.” When he went home, he and some friends decided to live life to the fullest by making a living off their love of sailing, and opened a mail-order company specializing in nautical goods. They named it Land’s End, after the fabled westernmost tip of Cornwall. On the cover of their first catalogue, in 1963, Land’s End appeared as Lands’ End, a truly fabulous place. The company couldn’t afford to reprint the catalogue, and the misplaced apostrophe did not prevent Comer from becoming a billionaire.
Apostrophes seem to be always on the move. I used to think the loss of the apostrophe in place-names was a natural process, a form of linguistic erosion. You see it all the time in New York: the Bronx was once owned by Jonas Bronck: Bronck’s farm—the Bronx. Queens was claimed by the British in the name of Catherine of Braganza; that land was the Queen’s—Queens. Rikers Island, Wards Island, and Randalls Island were named for Riker, Ward, and Randall. St. Marks Place, home of head shops and tattoo parlors, was named for St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, New York’s oldest continuously operating center of worship, which retains its hyphens.