The Trouble with Apostrophes.

The use of apostrophes probably causes more angst than any other form of punctuation. The good news is that the rules are relatively simple, so can be easily learned and put into practice.

The photo was taken in my local supermarket just before Christmas. There are 4 apostrophes and all of them wrong.

Let’s look at why.

Plurals. When we are writing about many things we just add ‘s’ to the end of the word e.g. many dogs, several books, boxes of lettuces.

So, we can see in the photo that the supermarket is offering us the option to buy lobsters, prawns and whole salmon sides. There are many of these for sale not just one, so an apostrophe is not needed.

The supermarket is also saying it can take orders, again many not just one, so no apostrophe should be used.

It doesn’t matter if the word ends in a consonant or a vowel, we never need to use an apostrophe if we just want to say there are many things available.

e.g. lots of avocados, plenty of photos.

Even if you are making plurals of an abbreviation, a name or a number, you still don’t need to add an apostrophe.

e.g. my collection of CDs, several Hail Marys, the 1990s.

When do you need an apostrophe?

1. The most common reason is to show possession of something. We put ‘s when we want to show possession with a singular noun (one thing):

e.g. the boy’s job, Pam’s notebook, the door’s lock, the table’s legs

and a plural noun which doesn’t already finish in ‘s’:

e.g. the people’s opinions, women’s rights, children’s toys.

When the plural noun already finishes in 's', then the apostrophe is added to the end of the word:

e.g. the dogs’ collars (this shows there is more than one dog that has a collar),

the boys’ jobs (this shows there is more than one boy with a job)

our neighbours’ fence (this makes it clear there is more than one neighbour).

However, you don’t use ‘s for possessive in the following;

Give the cat its dinner – we only use ‘s with it when we want to say ‘it is’ (it’s) or ‘it has’ (it’s).

A friend of yours – possessive pronouns like his, hers, ours, theirs, yours, don’t need ‘s.

2. Contractions. We use an apostrophe to show missing letters in a word, such as with these verbs:

e.g. she won’t go out tonight, we’ll have pasta for dinner, it isn’t time yet, you’d better leave

and nouns:

e.g. bo’sun, will-o’-the-wisp, ma’am.

This is often seen in literature and older texts:

e.g. how tender ‘tis to love , much belov’d.

To sum up.

So, in a nutshell, we use an apostrophe to either show possession or to show there is a letter missing in a word. We don’t need to use one if we are talking about plurals.

There are some more detailed and specific uses of apostrophes but if you follow the rules above, you will avoid doing what my local supermarket did!