Who’s confused by whose confusion?

The following exchange appears in Jonathan Lethem’s novel Girl in Landscape (on p. 208 of my Faber and Faber edition, 2002):

“I don’t have a home,” said Ben Barth.

“Well, who’s fault is that?” said Wa.

Who’s is a contraction of who is or who has (or occasionally who was): Who’s going? Who’s got tickets? Looks who’s talking; whereas whose is a possessive pronoun – it’s who in the genitive case – so it should have been used in the quoted passage: whose fault is that?

Confusion arises because who’s and whose are pronounced identically, and also because the ’s in who’s can mislead people into thinking it has to do with possession: If the cap isn’t Jo‘s or Jim‘s, then who‘s whose is it? (This apostrophe-led impression of possession probably also inspires the erroneous your’s, her’s, our’s and their’s.)

Who’s for whose is a common mistake in informal writing, and it sometimes sneaks past editors too. To keep who’s in its rightful place, you can use the same mnemonic I recommended for it’s and its: just as it’s always means it is or it has, so who’s means who is or who has. Bring this to mind any time you’re uncertain, and you shouldn’t slip up.

I liked Girl in Landscape, incidentally; it’s a coming-of-age story in a sci-fi setting with elements of mystery and western. It also has examples of dialectal would of (We should of killed them; you’d of met him), which I wrote about recently. I’m not a fan of the construction, but since I’ve seen it in dialogue from several capable authors, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I can’t say the same for who’s fault.

Inkhorns in the past, apostrophes in the future

I have two new posts up on Macmillan Dictionary Blog. The first, The fashion for inkhorn terms, continues the discussion of plain English (the blog’s theme for December and January) and looks at some of the reasons language can fail to achieve its main purpose: communication.

In particular, I look at the once-popular ornate style of writing that

combined elaborate syntax with a multitude of rhetorical devices and what became known as “inkhorn terms”. An inkhorn is an inkwell made of horn, and inkhorn term is what Michael Quinion calls “a term of gentlemanly abuse” that was applied to fancy words borrowed from classical languages during the gradual shift from Middle to Modern English. . . .

In The Story of Language, C. L. Barber writes that in early Modern English “the trickle of Latin loans becomes a river, and by 1600 it is a deluge”. But many Latin and Latinate loans that were attacked as inkhorn terms gradually slipped into the standard vocabulary and are now thoroughly integrated into English . . .

Read on for examples of inkhorn terms that survived and ones that faded.

Next, Apostrophe apostasy returns to the story about Waterstones’ apostrophe that I recently addressed on Sentence first. I speculate on why people get so upset by trivial changes to a company’s style, and I ponder what the future might hold for this troublesome punctuation mark:

Minor matters of style and punctuation have a way of agitating people, and worlds of contention spring from trivial distinctions. Language usage is also a convenient scapegoat through which people can express their displeasure and unease with big business, youth culture, societal change, the anticipated end of civilisation . . . .

We may see a trend towards using [the apostrophe] less where its absence doesn’t appear too odd. Well-known companies deleting it from their names will contribute to this shift, as will its omission from much informal communication in text messages and online chat, especially where character count is a constraint.

This post prompted some fascinating comments, which you can read here. If you’d like to browse my older posts at Macmillan, you can go straight to the archive.

Waterstones’ apostrophe: a victim of rebranding

We’ve been here before — with Birmingham City Council and assorted businesses and place names — and we’ll be here again. A prominent organisation, this time Waterstones, has officially dropped the apostrophe from its name, sparking outrage from self-anointed protectors of the language.

Waterstones’ managing director James Daunt said: (PDF)

Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling. It also reflects an altogether truer picture of our business today which, while created by one, is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers.

This seems entirely reasonable to me. The fact that it’s a bookseller, of course, compounds the agony for the is-nothing-sacred crowd, who last year worked themselves into a state of pseudo-grief and fury over the non-death of the serial comma, and who now protest this latest insult on Twitter and Facebook and in comments on news websites.

John Richards, of the Apostrophe Protection Society, is predictably unhappy with Waterstones: “You would really hope that a bookshop is the last place to be so slapdash with English.” If the quote is accurate, his use of slapdash is itself slapdash: the word means hasty or careless, and I’m quite sure Waterstones are being anything but.

Martin MacConnol, in a sensible post about the furore, points out that Waterstones’ name “is a brand mark, and thus doesn’t follow the normal rules of grammar”. David Marsh at the Guardian says it’s “no catastrophe”. But he recommends carrying a felt-tip pen and Tipp-Ex to tackle public lapses in punctuation, à la Lynne Truss, which sounds like a recipe for hypercorrection and Pedantry Gone Wild.

One blogger, whose identity I’ll spare, lamented the news thus:

So now you know: apostrophes that used to feature in Waterstone’s will shuffle off to reappear in genitive its — as if to spite me. They might also find a niche in the aberrant “s-form” Tesco’s (from Tesco), which Lorraine Woodward studied in her interesting dissertation “The supermarket storm: an investigation into an aspect of variation”.

My favourite reaction was from Waterstones of Oxford Street, whose Twitter account posted the photo below (cropped; source unknown), followed by a series of faux-poignant tweets about the apostrophe’s last day at work with the company. “A victim of rebranding”, indeed.

By the standards of common punctuation marks, the apostrophe has had a short existence bedevilled by instability and inconsistency. As Christina Cavella and Robin Kernodle’s paper “How the Past Affects the Future: The Story of the Apostrophe” (PDF) shows, there has always been disagreement and uncertainty about how best to use it.

So no, this is nothing to get upset about, and language is not going to the dogs. The fuss over Waterstones’ dropped apostrophe will soon blow over for all but a few committed sticklers, to be relived next time a big brand or institution puts pragmatism over fastidious punctuation. Best get used to it.

Updates:

Two excellent posts on Waterstones and the use and history of the apostrophe: Michael Rosen explores the politics of punctuation [via]; and David Crystal notes that English writing did fine for almost a millennium without the mark.

John E. McIntyre weighs in at You Don’t Say (subscription). Apostrophe usage is “a mess and a muddle”, he writes, and resolving it all is “a doomed venture”. So we shouldn’t fret over brands and signs and menus but instead focus on our own writing. He concludes with a fine line — “You can’t weed the world, but you can cultivate your garden” — that echoes an analogy by C. S. Lewis I wrote about recently.

In my post, I avoided linking to any (of the many) tiresome, end-is-nigh reactions to this story. But Mark Liberman at Language Log has gone a different and amusing route, ironically playing up the Daily Mail‘s apocalyptic panic by recruiting no less a barbarian than Shakespeare.

Also at Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum rejects the argument that apostrophes are needed to avoid ambiguity. He finds it sad and irritating that people

[try] to represent themselves as educated thinking defenders of the English language by mouthing off cluelessly about grammatical topics, voicing allegations about “incorrectness” and “ambiguity” that cannot withstand even a few seconds of thought. There is nothing whatever about the decision on the new Waterstones trade name that relates to grammar or grammatical error at all.

Its, it’s: It’s a problem

Some pet linguistic peeves are indulged, I find, not for reasons of clarity or grammatical soundness, but out of petty pedantry, habitual curmudgeonliness, or some kind of character disorder. On the other hand, I’ve been accused – affectionately, I hope – of excessive tolerance in such matters. But I have peeves of my own, one of which is the confusion over its and it’s.

Lynne Truss considers this “the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation”. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves she writes that it “sets off a simple Pavlovian ‘kill’ response in the average stickler”, and goes on to fantasise – satirically, one hopes – about lightning strikes and unmarked graves.

My instincts are less violently judgemental. I don’t get wound up over its/it’s confusion – but I often wince at it, particularly when it appears in edited prose. So, I imagine, does Roger Ebert:

To summarise the difference: it’s is always a contraction of it is or it has. Usually the former. Keep this front and centre, and you’ll greatly reduce your chances of ever getting it wrong. Its is the possessive form of it – the third person neuter possessive pronoun. So you might write of a solitary ant: “It’s lost its way.”

It’s not just students, bloggers and learners who mix up its and it’s, but also people for whom words are central to their trade – journalists, broadcasters, reviewers, professors of law, and so on. I’ve seen lexicographers and linguists slip up.

Evidently it’s a major source of confusion – a mistake so common as to be virtually normalised. But I’m an editor with a hero-of-Haarlem complex, so I feel duty bound to do what I can. Lawrence Lessig almost put it well:

A look at the causes might shed some light. There are, I suspect, three main reasons for the confusion. One is that its is an exception to a well-known rule: Add apostrophe-s for possession. Hence the ill-advised leap from, say, the dog’s tail to *it’s tail. Another reason is contagion: the mistaken forms are very prevalent, and their every appearance reinforces the wrongness. The third main reason is that many people don’t care.

Apparently, iPhones auto-correct its to it’s, which might explain Mr Lessig’s lapse. A friend on Twitter thinks this faulty auto-correct feature is responsible for a fair proportion of the confusion on Twitter. She’s probably right. It’s also worth noting that its and it’s have quite a tangled history.

Maybe you’d consider its/it’s confusion a negligible matter – the pet rock of pet peeves. It rarely leads to misinterpretation, and it sure doesn’t amount to much on a cosmic scale. But careful readers will notice the mistake and consider it a sign of inattention, sloppiness, ignorance, or even illiteracy – especially if it’s repeated. So if you value good communication, it’s a distinction you ought to make, and make consistently.

That its/it’s mistakes occur in the prose of reputable publications and careful writers shows how easily confusion creeps in. But with vigilance and application we can defend ourselves from it. If you’re prone to this mix-up, even occasionally, you might want to condition yourself to observe the distinction. Here’s how. For as long as I can remember, I’ve habitually read erroneous it’s as it is. So, for example, in The Guardian last week I saw the following:

I automatically read this as “in all it is bewildering glory”, with a slight slow emphasis on “it is”. The same goes for these errors on the HSE and Galway City Council websites:

Semantically, I inferred what was meant, but in parallel I processed the absurdities (“it is companion book”; “it is environs”). Doing this for years has given me a kind of immunity, I think, by steadily and deeply embedding the rule in my nervous system. I’m very strongly sensitised to it. Accepting it’s as its would undermine this conditioning, so I don’t.

* * *

Update: I’ll use this space to add occasional examples I consider striking. For example, I didn’t expect to see the error slip past the editors at The Economist – but it did:

The mistake has since been fixed. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Plain English Campaign has fallen prey to this basic error:

Here’s The Boston Globe, not only getting it wrong, but misquoting the New York Times Magazine in the process:

The NYT itself has its moments of weakness:

In a post titled “Not OK”, here’s Language Log (third line from the bottom; subsequently fixed):

Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr:

John Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air:

Anthony de Mello’s One Minute Nonsense gets it right and wrong in the same sentence:

The BBC:

A pack of Siúcra granulated sugar:

Poetry Foundation (spotted by Paraic O’Donnell); now fixed:

The BBC Entertainment News Twitter account, which acknowledged the mistake amusingly a few tweets later:

A headlining typo in Cois Coiribe, the newsletter of alumni and friends of National University of Ireland, Galway:

io9:

Both correct and incorrect forms of the possessive pronoun its appear in the same clause in my Penguin Books edition of The Haunting, a short supernatural novel by Margaret Mahy (the mistake occurs twice in the book):

Nicola Barker’s Five Miles From Outer Hope:

Brian Moore’s novel The Temptation of Eileen Hughes:

Mythmakers & Lawbreakers, edited by Margaret Killjoy; interview with Alan Moore:

An old New Yorker cartoon:

A headline in the Galway Independent newspaper reverses the usual its/it’s confusion:

An errant apostrophe appears in the phrase “Many Worlds Interpretation” in John Gribbin’s book In Search of the Multiverse:

[more on apostrophes]

Note: this post also appears on the Visual Thesaurus (subscription required).

Plain English and Golden Bulls

Yesterday the Plain English Campaign announced the winners of its Golden Bull awards 2009, a dubious honour given to individuals and companies who have unleashed the best gobbledegook upon an unfortunate reading public. And by ‘best’ I mean ‘worst’.

Unfortunately, the page is littered with erroneous apostrophes. Part of the problem seems to be a formatting glitch, which I’ve noted before: WordPress and some other self-publishing platforms automatically curl apostrophes and inverted commas (AKA quotation marks), sometimes the wrong way. That the apostrophes have been transformed into double inverted commas is another matter:

But that’s enough cosmetic griping. And since I drafted this post, a representative of the Plain English Campaign has contacted me to say they will soon fix the problem.

Among this year’s Golden Bull winners were Coca Cola, who “outsource some aspects of our Finance transactional processing activities”, and the UK Department of Health, who report that primary disease prevention “has been described as refocusing upstream to stop people falling in the waters of disease”. I must admit I like this description, in the same way that I like terrible poetry, but I understand why its use by the British government should invite censure and even ridicule.

I will pause a moment, to allow your nervous system to ready itself for a final example:

Neither the execution and delivery by the Consultant of this Agreement nor the consummation by it of any of the transactions contemplated hereby, requires, with respect to it, the consent or approval of the giving of notice to, the registration, with the record or filing of any document with, or the taking of any other action in respect of any government authority, except such as are not yet required (as to which it has no reason to believe that the same will not be readily obtainable in the ordinary course of business upon due application therefore) or which have been duly obtained and are in full force and effect.

This snippet of extreme legalese, a stupefyingly convoluted clause in a contractors’ agreement, comes courtesy of the Dublin Airport Authority. It is so tortuous that it is virtually incomprehensible, yet one suspects that what it purports to convey is really quite straightforward. Legal diction, however, is “almost necessarily obscure”, as Ernest Gowers put it in The Complete Plain Words.

If it is readily intelligible, so much the better; but it is far more important that it should yield its meaning accurately that that it should yield it on first reading, and the legal draftsman cannot afford to give much attention, if any, to euphony or literary elegance. What matters most to him is that no one will succeed in persuading a court of law that his words bear a meaning he did not intend, and, if possible, that no one will think it worth while to try.
All this means that his drafting is not to be judged by normal standards of good writing…

Double standards therefore do apply, and with good reason, but problems arise when legal jargon is selected for its own sake, or because one suffers from jargonitis — an inability to avoid using jargon even when plain English alternatives are possible and appropriate. The condition may be contagious.

Since I am not a lawyer, I will not try to translate the Dublin Airport Authority’s example into readable and unambiguous English. I will instead refer readers to an earlier post on Sentence first, concerning the plain style and its advantages in formal writing. ‘Notes on the plain style’ was in fact my second ever post on this blog, following a brief introduction, and it received its first comment quite recently. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that a comment from a new reader is infinitely better than a Golden Bull Award.

[For more like this, click on gobbledegook or plain English in the tag cloud on the right-hand side of this page.]

Introducing the apostrophantom

In previous posts I have mentioned the apostrofly, described in the Guardian style book as “an insect that lands at random on the printed page, depositing an apostrophe wherever it lands”. It looks like this. What then do we make of an entity that absconds from the printed page, leaving only a ghostly trace of the apostrophe it once was?

Here is an image from Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (click to enlarge):

Close examination of the word its in the first thought bubble will show you what I mean: there is visible, if only just, a faint smudge in a space that formerly accommodated an errant apostrophe. Someone spotted this apostrophe and dealt with it, presumably with a ruthless efficiency of the sort Batman employs to put evildoers out of action.

That apostrophe, once spotted, never stood a chance, but in its wake there remains an indelible mark testifying to its former corporeality. It is no longer an apostrophe, but it is evidently not nothing; I call this mark the apostrophantom.

This blend describes what it denotes, and also serves to honour the much-maligned genre (superhero comics) that inspired it. Compared with the apostrofly, the apostrophantom is an elusive creature, a rare typographical spectre. Yet it exists — we have seen it with our own eyes, and now we have evidence to persuade the sceptics.

By the way, if the internal monologue illustrated above disturbs you, you wouldn’t be the only one. But rest assured that the relationship between Batman and Robin (AKA Carrie) was chaste, and that the writer knew what he was doing.

Plurals of acronyms, abbreviations, initialisms and single letters

Plurals of acronyms, abbreviations, initialisms and single letters do not usually take apostrophes. Guidance on this issue is not unanimous, but some general advice can be consistently applied, and may help resolve some of the widespread confusion that seems to be generating even more widespread confusion.

Pictured is a screenshot from Twitter, taken a few months ago, showing popular subjects or “Trending Topics”. The vast numbers of people using Twitter means that for a subject to become a “Trending Topic”, it needs to be mentioned a great deal. Because the software distinguishes between two words that are identical apart from the presence or absence of an apostrophe, both “SATs” and “SAT’s” have the potential to appear concurrently in the list, as indeed they did. Evidently, both forms are widely used. My preference is for “SATs”, and I would consider “SAT’s” ill-advised, because such apostrophes are largely unnecessary and potentially confusing.

A recent report from TechCrunch illustrates the potential for miscues from apostrophised plurals: