Apostrophilia

I have another confession to make here.

Misplaced apostrophes annoy me, and I suspect I’m hardly alone in this. Which is ironic, or fitting, given that the root verb of the word apostrophe means ‘to turn away from’…

There is something particularly grating about an error that arrives dressed as diligence, but is, as my wife likes to say, all fur coat but no knickers.

The plural noun accessorised with punctuation it never asked for, as in pizza’s; the possessive split-brain, as in the famous it’s; the decade rendered as the 1980’s' with an air of orthographic confidence that no stage of English historical codification ever warranted. A Bacchic ululating orgy of madness…

But beyond my quasi atavistic irritation, what’s curious is the strict directionality of the error.

The contraction apostrophe is, in practice, essentially immune to deletion by the same people who deploy the mark so liberally elsewhere. What I mean by that is that nobody writes its raining or shes laughing.

The elision form sits undisturbed while the plural and possessive categories absorb an apostrophic surplus that grammar never ok-ed in the first place. I don’t think this is symmetrical confusion. That would produce omission and commission errors in roughly equal measure. The apostrophe accretes, but it doesn’t discount. There’s an addition trap, not a subtraction bias, a kind of apostrophilia running amok.

I’ll venture a cognitive explanation here, which I find plausible.

The misplaced apostrophe looks less like a rule misapplied and more like an availability heuristic at work. The mark gets retrieved as a generalised signal of orthographic seriousness rather than deployed through rule-governed reasoning.

Punctuation feels like the sort of thing careful writers attend to, so the apostrophe gets pressed into service regardless of whether the grammar asked for it. It may be a signalling device as we play the status game, advertising, incorrectly, our mastery of punctuation and orthography.

The apostrophe is the eye on the peacock’s tail. Everyone wants to have more, because everyone thinks everyone wants (and values) them.

Which raises, ultimately, an uncomfortable hypothesis. The hypercorrect apostrophe may function as a shibboleth, less a syntactic instrument than a performance of literacy, one that, with some regularity, exposes precisely the gap it was meant to conceal. Although, when everyone ends up playing the same strategy, the equilibrium causes the performance and signalling of literacy to be self-defeating.