Apostrophes and contractions Part of the reason that people find apostrophes confusing is that we use them in two different ways: to show possession (or, as I prefer to say, close association) between two things to show where letters have been left out of word or where it has been contracted (sometimes the contracted word
In Australia, it is quite simple, if ungrammatical and plain stupid. A bureaucratic body ( the Geographical Names Board) decided back in 1966 that no Australian place names should contain possessive apostrophes. This means we are stuck with wrong-looking (and, in my view, plain wrong) names such as Devils Marbles (thankfully, we can use the
I have never been a fan of the explanation that apostrophes are used to show ‘possession’; I prefer to use ‘association’. After, Saint Patrick doesn’t own his cathedral; he is associated with it, because it is dedicated to him. A dog doesn’t own its collar or the bowl it eats from, but the dog’s collar
Many people think about apostrophes in the same way they think about getting stuck in a patch of cactus: they’d rather not. But possessive apostrophes for plural words and names are relatively simple (certainly compared with singular personal names). There is straightforward two-step process: Step 1: Add an apostrophe after the end of the plural
The elegant and under-appreciated semicolon has just two uses: instead of a comma, it separates long items in a list (but not in dot-point lists); it also can be used in place of (not as well as) and or but to join together two short sentences into a longer sentence. (In technical terms, a semicolon