2021-05-05 ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด – A – apostrophe

Revision A

2021-05-05'

ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด – A – apostrophe

แนะนำการใช้ ตามที่ส่วนใหญ่ใช้ แต่ละท้องถิ่น

ความหมาย อาจผันแปร ตาม ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค

Dictionary.com

ออกเสียง apostrophe = ‘uh=POS-truh-fee’

Adj. – apostrophic ออกเสียง ‘ap-uh-STROF-ik’or ‘ap-uh-STROH-fik’

Dictionary.com

What Is A LiteraryApostrophe?

When you hear apostrophe, you probably think of this symbol:’, right?

Well, today, we’re actually talking about

the literary device, which is completely different.

A literary apostrophe is

“when a speaker addresses an absent party as if they were present.”

Why do we use apostrophes in literature?

Literaryapostrophes are great for conveying emotion.

They allow the speaker more expression

and offer a better view of their inner thoughts and feelings.

Apostrophes in literature were used a lot in the early 1900s and before,

but today they’re much less common.

Sometimes you’ll still see them in poems, plays, and songs.

You’ve definitely heard them in everyday speech.

What is the formatof literary apostrophe?

The purposeof an apostrophe in literature is

to directthe reader’s attention

tosomething other than the person who’s speaking.

Apostrophes frequently target an absent person or a third party.

Other times,

they focus on an inanimateobject, a place, or even an abstract idea.

They’ll often beginwith an exclamation.

This may be a sound, like O!

It could also be the name of the thing the speaker’s addressing.

Take this example from a poem by Emily Dickinson:

GOOD night! which put the candle out?

A jealous zephyr, not a doubt.

Ah! friend, you little knew

How long at that celestial wick

The angels labored diligent;

Extinguished, now, for you!

At the start of this stanza,

Dickinson addresses the night by exclaiming its name.

She asks what blew out the candle, and then decides it was a zephyr

(or a small breeze).

The next line starts a new apostrophe with Ah!

This one is addressed to friend, which refers to the zephyr.

Dickinson then ends the poem by talking to the breeze about the extinguished candle.

Apostrophe to an absent person

Sometimes apostrophes addressan absent person or people.

One example is the song “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”

from the musical Les Misérables.

Marius sits alone in a café, remembering his friends,

who died in battle earlier in the musical.

He sings

“Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me / That I live and you are gone.”

By addressing characters who aren’t there,

he’s able to show his true feelings without reservation.

Apostrophe to a thing

Apostrophes to inanimate objects can create strong imagery.

Songwriters tend to do this a lot.

The song “Blue Moon,” written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart,

starts with an apostrophe to the moon:

“Blue moon / You saw me standing alone / Without a dream in my heart.”

By speaking to the moon, the singer paints a vivid picture for listeners.

Apostrophe to an idea

Apostrophes can also address an abstract idea, like love.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, there’s one addressed to the concept of ingratitude:

“Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, /

More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child / Than the sea-monster.”

Apostrophes in everyday speech

Apostrophes show up in everyday speech all the time.

People use them to addressobjects or missing people.

For example, someone waiting at a red light might say,

“Come on, light, turn green!”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

'Apostrophe'

A thousand newspapers, blogs, and twitter feeds

found themselves unable to resist temptation,

and posted typo-laden accounts of the demise

of the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS).

The pedants’ pedant:

why the Apostrophe Protection Society has closed in disgust

After 18 years of policing grammatical abuse from around the world,

the APS has conceded defeat.

The punctuation barbarians have won
- (headline) The Guardian (London, Eng.), 2 Dec. 2019

The APS was formed in 2001,

ostensibly as a means of helping writers the world over

in putting their apostrophes in the correct places.

Here is our periodic reminder:

there has never been a point

in the history of the English-speaking and English-writing people

where we all agreedon how apostrophes should be used,

and there never will be.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Word History

The Other Kind of 'Apostrophe'

It's when we speak to you and it's like you're not here.

What to Know

As a literary device,

apostrophe refers to a speech or address to

a person who is not present or to a personified object,

such as Yorick's skull in Hamlet.

It comes from the Greek word apostrephein which means "to turn away."

You are already familiar with the punctuation mark

known as the apostrophe.

It’s used chiefly in tandem with

an s to indicate possession (as in Joe’s car)

or in contractions to stand in for letters that are elided

(as in couldn’t or you’ll).

Apostrophe's Other Use

If you study drama or rhetoric,

you will be familiarwith an entirely different idea of apostrophe

—that is, the makingof a speech

or address to an absent person

or a thing that is personified (such as Death).

As Love’s play begins, she stands tense and exhausted on her front porch, surrounded by red, rolling sky, pulling on a cigarette

and staring into the void.

She speaks aloud a letter she’s writing to someone called Ruby,

then falters, turns the paper over, and begins to write to God instead.

(Love’s play features an epigraph from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,

and the novel’s influence is present throughout,

especially in Olivia’s apostrophes to God.)
— Sara Holdren, Vulture, 15 Oct. 2018

A commonly cited instance of apostrophe

occurs in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet,

when Hamlet comes across the skull of the jester Yorick, which has been exhumed.

“Alas, poor Yorick!” he says, calling his old friend

“a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

He then turns back to address Yorick by way of the skull:

Ham. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Apostrophe can consist of one speaking to an inanimate object

—such as how Tom Hanks's character addresses the volleyball named Wilson in the film Cast Away (2000).

It can occur as a figure of speech,

as in the old advertising slogan "Calgon, take me away!"

Origin of 'Apostrophe'

The words for both the punctuation mark

and the dramatic device come from a Greek verb,

apostrephein, meaning “to turn away.”

But they took slightly different paths en route to English,

with the dramatic device passing through Latin

and the punctuationthrough Late Latin and French.

The adjective apostrophic pertains to the dramatic device:

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Chicken" was, apparently, written with a total lack of irony.

It includes a stanza full of apostrophic plea to meat substitutes:

"Oh soy 'chicken,' where are your bones?

/ Where shall I get broth, rich in minerals?

/ Oh soy 'chicken,' where is your fat?

/ Without Jewish penicillin, how to cure my husband's cold?"
— Kathleen Alcott, The New Yorker, 22 June 2015

The verb strephein, meaning “to turn” in Greek,

is found in other words pertaining to the art of rhetoric.

One is anastrophe

(the inversion of the usual syntactical order of words for rhetorical effect),

often referred to as Yoda-speak, for the sagacious Star Wars character known for speaking in object-subject-verb syntax.

An example comes from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1848): "Talent, Mr. Micawber has; capital, Mr. Micawber has not."

Epistrophe is the repetition of a word or expression at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses

(such as Abraham Lincoln's "of the people, by the people, for the people").

And we would be remiss if we didn’t bring up catastrophe,

which to most people means an utter failure or disaster,

but in theaterrefers to the final action that completes the unraveling of a dramatic plot.

And while we’d hate to end our article on apostrophe

on sucha catastrophic turn, them’s the breaks.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Word History

Why DoWe Use Apostrophes to Show Possession?

The roleof the apostrophe has shifted over time

Some like to think of the English language as an orderly sort of thing,

a rockof stability in the chaos and uncertainty of life.

Yet this is far from true: our language is a sloppy mess.

Consider the apostrophe.

There has never been an innocent time

in which we all agreed on

whatthe apostrophe was supposed to do.

Not onlydoes such consensus not exist in the past,

it doesn’t exist now:

the roleof this troubling little punctuation mark is still in flux.

The 's' at the end of a word indicating possession

("The king's fashion sense") probably comes from the Old English custom

of adding '-es' to singular genitive masculine nouns

(in modern English, "The kinges fashion sense").

In this theory, the apostrophe stands in for the missing 'e'.

The markwe call an apostrophe probably originated in 1509,

in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529,

at the hand of the French printer Geoffroy Tory,

who is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla.

Before apostrophe referred to a squiggle on the page,

it was a rhetorical term for an address to a usually absent person

or a usually personified thing

(the word comes from the Greek apostrophē,

which literally means “the act of turning away”).

The firstgrammatical apostrophes addressed absence in a different way.

It is widely acceptedthat the first apostrophes were marks of elision

which indicated that something had been taken out of the word.

Here's where things begin to get confusing:

the apostrophe would be stuck into a word

to indicate the removal of a letter

(usually a vowel) which was not pronounced,

such as the e in “walk’d.”

But sometimes people would simply stick an apostrophe

in the middle of a word for no discernible reason,

as the 17th century poet Robert Herrick did when he wrote

“What fate decreed, time now ha’s made us see.”

To make things even more confusing,

people refused to agree on

exactly which lettersshould be replaced with an apostrophe;

often it was unvoiced single vowels,

but occasionally it was larger pieces of a word,

such as the re and as of fo’c’sle.

Then people began using apostrophes

to indicate the genitive (or possessive) role of a noun,

confusing the public even further.

The roleof the apostrophe in a phrase like

“the apostrophe’s role”

was hotly debated for decades.

Some people thought that the s at the end of a word

indicating possessionwas simply a stand-in for “his,”

and so“the king’s book”

would be the shortened version of “the king his book.”

This theory is no longer popular.

Instead, it seems likely that the genitive apostrophe

is an illustration of our language’s older, highly inflectional state.

It's like this:

in Old English it wascommon to add an -es

to singular genitive masculine and neuter nouns.

For instance,

the genitive form of the word for king, cyning, would be cyninges.

In Middle English, feminine nouns tended to be similarly inflected.

So, the apostrophe is still functioning, in a way,

as a mark of elision,

insofar as it is standing in for the missing e of a long-disused genitive case.

That’s all well and good, but why are things still in such a jumble?

Why haven’t wemanaged to iron out all the kinks and finally figure out

what we’re supposed to dowith the apostrophe?

The simple answer, once again,

is that there has never been any widespread agreement

in terms of how we should use the apostrophe.

The Oxford Companion to the English Language

notes that when Shakespeare’s First Folio was published, in 1623,

a mere 4% of the words in it for which we would today

usean apostrophe to indicate possession had such punctuation.

Shakespeare was hardly alone in using his apostrophes willy-nilly;

in a single article from Poor Richard’s Almanac,

Benjamin Franklin both uses and omits the apostrophe for the genitive form of it:

If thou injurest Conscience, it will have its Revenge on thee.

And having calculated the Distance and allow’d Time for it’s Falling,

finds that next Spring we shall have a fine April shower.

One does not have to look very hard to find

examples ofapostrophes being manhandled

and put into places where we today would consider them inappropriate.

This does not meanthat

the people who used them thusly were uneducated

(see: Jane Austen and Thomas Jefferson),

butinstead shows us that

there wasn’t any widespread agreement on the matter.

Here are some now-discarded things

that grammarians have said about

how to usethe apostrophe over the centuries:

The third person singular of certain Verbs,

with the Nominative it set before it, is used Impersonally:

as, It rain's, it snow's, it lighten's, it thunder's….
—Jeremiah Wharton, The English-Grammar, 1654

It shouldn’t be used as it’s for “it is” at all:

It’s for it is is vulgar; ‘tis is used.
—James Buchanan, A Regular English Syntax, 1767

Today, most of us feel comfortable

in the knowledge that we don’t use apostrophes for verbs,

and few of us still say or write 'tis.

Yet while these are extreme examples from long ago,

there are numerous ways in which

the apostrophe’s use has changed within the past few decades.

A number of institutions,

such as Harrods department store and Barclays bank,

have decided that

the apostrophes that long were part of their names

are no longer necessary.

And it was formerly more common

to write 1930’s, rather than 1930s,

but a look at each of these forms in several newspaper databases

shows that this practice is changing.

During the 1930’s,

the West nurtured a very strong interest in things Chinese, including art.
—David L. Shirley, The New York Times, 17 Apr., 1971

The works were reportedly confiscated by the Nazis during the 1930s and ’40s….
—Adam W. Kepler, The New York Times, 3 Nov., 2013

For those who are wholly uninterested in the history of the apostrophe

and simply want to know the difference between it’s and its,

we have a video that should clear that up.

And for those who fear that they will never

wrap their heads around all the whys and wherefores

(which a small minority has always insisted on

writing as “why’s and wherefore’s) of the apostrophe,

here's a cheering thought:

no matter how badly you misuse this punctuation,

there is a good chance that

some famous writer in the past has done the same thing.

Furthermore, there is a sporting chance that

any mistakes you make with it will one day come back into fashion.

Common Errors In English Usage Dictionary

apostrophe

First let’s all join in a hearty curse of the grammarians

who inserted the wretched apostrophe into possessives in the first place.

It was all a mistake.

Our ancestorsused to write “Johns hat” meaning “the hat of John”

without the slightest ambiguity.

However, some time in the Renaissance

certain scholars decided that the simple “s” of possession

must have been formed out of a contraction

of the more “proper”

“John his hat.”

Since in Englishwe mark contractions with an apostrophe,

they did so, and we were stuck with the stupid “John’s hat.”

Their errorcan be a handy reminder though:

if you’re not sure

whether a noun ending in “s” should be followed by an apostrophe,

ask yourself

whether you could plausibly substitute “his” or “her” for the “s.”

The exceptionto this pattern is personal pronouns

indicating possession like“his,” “hers,” and “its.”

For more on this point, see “its/it’s.”

Get this straightonce and for all:

whenthe “s” is added to a word simply to make it a plural,

no apostrophe is used

(except in expressions where letters or numerals are treated like words,

like“mind your P’s and Q’s” and “learn your ABC’s”).

Apostrophes are also used to indicate omitted letters in real contractions: “do not” becomes “don’t.”

Why can’twe all agree to do away with the wretched apostrophe?

Becauseits two uses

—contraction and possession

—have people so thoroughly confused that

they are always putting in apostrophes where they don’t belong,

in simpleplurals (“cucumber’s for sale”)

and family names when they are referred to collectively (“the Smith’s”).

The practiceof putting improper apostrophes

in family names on signs in front yards is an endless source of confusion.

“The Brown’s”is just plain wrong.

(If you wanted to suggest “the residence of the Browns”

you would have to write “Browns’,”

with the apostrophe after the “S,”

which is there to indicate a plural number,

not as an indication of possession.)

If you simply want to indicate that a family named Brown lives here,

the sign out front should read simply “The Browns.”

When a name ends in an “S”

you need to add an “ES” to make it plural:

“the Adamses.”

Noapostrophes for simple plural names

ornames ending in “S,” OK?

I get irritated when people address me as “Mr. Brian’s.”

What about when plural names are used to indicate possession?

“The Browns’ cat” is standard(the second “S” is “understood”),

though some prefer “the Browns’s cat.”

The pattern is the same with names ending in “S”:

“the Adamses’ cat” or

—theoretically  —“the Adamses’s cat,”

though that would be mighty awkward.

It is not uncommon to see the “S” wrongly apostrophized even in verbs,

as in the mistaken “He complain’s a lot.”

The A-Z of Correct English Common Errors in English Dictionary

Apostrophes

(i) Apostrophes can be used to show that letters have been omitted:

= " in contractions

didn’t      o’clock

you’ve        won’t

= " in poetry

o’er vales and hills

where’er you walk

=" in dialect

’Ere’s, ’Arry

" in retail

pick ’n’ mix

salt ’n’ vinegar

(ii)     Apostrophes can be used to show ownership.

Follow these simple guidelines and

you’ll never put the apostrophe in the wrong place

Singular nouns or ‘owners’

The tail of the dog

The dog’s tail

Who ‘owns’ the tail?               the dog

Put the apostrophe

after the owner.            the dog’

Add -s.                                    the dog’s

Add what is ‘owned’.             the dog’s tail

The smile of the princess

The princess’s smile

Who ‘owns’ the smile?           the princess

Put the apostrophe

after the owner.                      the princess’

Add -s.                                    the princess’s

Add what is ‘owned’.             the princess’s smile

With proper names ending in -s,

you have a choice, depending upon how the name is pronounced.

Keats’ poetry or Keats’s poetry

But St James’s Square, London, SW1

St James’ (two syllables)

St James’s (three syllables)

Plural nouns or ‘owners’

Don’t worry about whether you use ’s or s’ in the plural.

It will sort itself out

The tails of the dogs

The dogs’ tails

Who ‘owns’ the tails?              the dogs

Put the apostrophe

after the owners.                     the dogs’

Add -s if there isn’t one.        (no need here)

Add what is ‘owned’               the dogs’ tails

The laughter of the women

The women’s laughter

Who ‘owns’ the laughter?      the women

Put the apostrophe

after the owners.                    the women’

Add -s if there isn’t one.                  the women’s

Add what is ‘owned’.              the women’s laughter

And so, when reading,

you will be able to distinguish singular and plural ‘owners’.

The princess’s suitors.

The princesses’ suitors.

The ‘owner’ is the word before the apostrophe.

(iii)    Apostrophes are also used in condensed expressions of time.

The work of a moment

A moment’s work.

The work of three years.

Three years’ work.

If you follow the guidelines in (ii) above,

you will never make a mistake