How to Avoid Some Common Punctuation Mistakes: The Misunderstood Apostrophe

Consider the apostrophe. It is perhaps the most overworked yet underappreciated of all the punctuation marks. Nothing could be more straightforward; however, aside from the comma, no mark is more misunderstood.

The apostrophe performs two major functions which make our lives more pleasant: it denotes possession and fills in for the letters left out of a contraction. And how do we thank it? With greed. We try to force the apostrophe to make words plural.

We take one sub, or hoagie, or hero, or whatever you call a big ol' sandwich in your part of the country, but we're not satisfied with just one big ol' sandwich and we say, "give me two sub's, or hoagie's, or hero's." Wrong-o. If you have one sub, but you're still hungry, all you have to do is add the letter "s" to the end of the word "sub" and abracadabra. It's plural. The apostrophe should be off taking a smoke break while you're ordering multiple sandwiches. Watch, I'll demonstrate again. Do you think I write boring article's? I don't. I write boring articles. Hey, wait a minute.

See, if I go to the store to buy some "sub's" what I am saying is that something belongs to the sub. If I say, "this sub's taste is great," aside from the fact that this is a somewhat awkward way to say the sub tastes great, I am correctly showing that the taste belongs to the sub. Similarly, I could say that this article's fourth paragraph is going on too long and I would be correct on both counts. The paragraph belongs to the article and it is droning on a bit.

Now hold on to your hat, because things are about to get hairy. What if someone whose name ends in an "s" wants to buy a car and we need the apostrophe to prove it belongs to him or her. What if Elvis wanted a Cadillac? Would it be Elvis' Cadillac, or would it be Elvis's Cadillac? It would be Elvis' Cadillac. The confusion is due to the fact that when the sentence is read aloud, it sounds like you are saying "Elvis's."