Who’s afraid of apostrophes?

Just picked up this little piece of spelling advice from Seth Godin. Quote Seth:

That’s the primary function of the apostrophe–to expose apostrophe ignorance.

You get no points for using one right, and lose big points when you market any idea while using them wrong. It doesn’t take long to check (especially in a headline or even worse, when designing a sign) and it’s worth it. The Marriott in Boston spent a fortune in interior decoration, and then decides to invent a whole new word.

My apologies, but I can’t resist playing Mr. Smartypants here - call it an occupational hazard.

The function of the s-genitive in English is to mark possession or relation, allowing me to refer to the vehicle owned by John as John’s car. The other construction that basically does the same thing is the of-genitive as in the mayor of New York. Note that New York’s mayor would be just as acceptable to most speakers, but the car of John seems at least a bit odd. If you are intrigued as to how this works, have a look at this seminal book on genitive variation by my colleague Anette Rosenbach.

But back to Seth’s restroom sign. The mistakes associated with the s-genitive come from its closeness in form to the most common plural marker in English, which is simply -s, with no apostrophe, as in one cat, two cats. This is annoying and confusing for a bunch of reasons.

1. In writing, the way the genitive is marked is as messy as can be. Usually we just stick ’s onto the end of a word, but when the word itself ends with s we only attach an apostrophe (e.g. Cornelius’ blog is boring to read). This is no clear-cut distinction though - some people would prefer Cornelius’s blog is boring to read. Beyond that there are cases where there appears to be a genitive, but the spelling doesn’t reflect it. Seth ironically closes his blog entry with the words

Sincerely your’s, Seth

which is of course incorrect - we write yours and its in English, though technically it would have to be your’s and it’s. The reason the latter versions aren’t used is that the apostrophe already plays another role in them. It’s is expanded to It is and your’s somehow suggests your is, which would be an irregular use of be. Thus yours, its, hers and his express possession without using an apostrophe in their spelling.

2. Next up, phonetically there is usually no distinction between s-genitive and plural, making anything marked in either way potentially ambiguous. Think about hearing the incomplete sentences “the cute cats…” versus “the cute cat’s…”. Without the ending of the sentence it would not be possible to tell whether this refers to several cats that are cute or something that a single cute cat has.

3. Furthermore, it is not phonetically discernible when something is genitive-marked and plural-marked at once. Take this utterance:

Jane owns two felines, Hairball and Garfield. The cute cats’ home is a typical mid-sized suburban apartment.

The cute cats’ home here means the home of Hairball and Garfield, something we can narrowly recognize just by looking at the spelling of cats’, even though that spelling is already very idiosyncratic. (Shouldn’t it be cats’s? As noted above, some people indeed think it should.) But in spoken language it is impossible to pick this information up. Without the first sentence we are not able to tell apart +GENITIVE +PLURAL and +GENITIVE -PLURAL (note that -GENITIVE +PLURAL is syntactically impossible in the example).

4. In the case of women’s (or womens, as the sign says), things are even slightly more complicated. The common way of marking the plural in English is by sticking -s onto the ending of a word, but there are less common alternatives, most of which are referred to as “unproductive” by linguists, because they are no longer used with newly coined words. Among these unusual endings are gems like -en (one ox, ten oxen) and a whole heap of endings for words with Latin and Greek origins such as criteria and alumni. Women has what is called an umlaut plural, in which a vowel sound is shifted, usually to a higher position, to indicate plurality.

5. Finally, what makes things just a tad quirkier is the question of whether or not we need a genitive at all here. In my own native language, German, the word for women’s restroom is Frauentoilette (the more polite Damentoilette, meaning ladies’ restroom, is more common, but the first version would certainly be understood). Frau means woman, Frauen means women and toilette means toilet. So the literal translation from German to English would be women restroom, where women modifies restroom to denote a specific kind of restroom. Since the women’s restroom isn’t exactly owned by women, one could argue that the genitive is obsolete, because we’re not indicating possession. It certainly isn’t essential to tell us what we want to know. It’s simply a convention of the English language.

So the restroom sign at the Boston Marriott has fallen victim to confusion on potentially several levels. Most likely the person who made the sign simply wrote it down as you would say it, not marking the distinction between plural and genitive correctly (note that this doesn’t mean the writer confused the difference between genitive and plural, but how to distinguish the two in spelling). Since the plural is already unambiguously marked via the umlaut, the -s at the end basically has to mark possession, apostrophe or no apostrophe. And even without any indication of a genitive, people would still understand what the sign refers to. It’s a thin line: I can state that I am storing files on my computer’s hard drive or on my computer hard drive and the meaning wouldn’t change in a way that would really affect what I am saying.

Now, of course Seth’s point was that such a mistake is sloppy and makes the hotel look bad and that’s perfectly true.

Diverging from standard language is risky because all sorts of associations - sloppiness, lack of education or even intelligence - are easily evoked when one makes certain errors. But then there are also examples where an unconventional way of writing eventually becomes mainstream. I’m not sure if McDonald’s introduced the simplified spelling of thru (instead of through) in the word drive-thru, or if the term has other origins, but it can certainly be called a success. There are many good reasons for using a modernized spelling for words ending with -ough and who knows, perhaps that will eventually happen in mainstream usage. While the situation is different with the genitive, the fairly high frequency of errors made by native speakers is a perfect indicator for the lack of coherence and clarity when it comes to “the rules”.