Misplaced Apostrophe's

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One of my pet peeves - ranked right after misuse of begs the question - is the misplacement of apostrophes.

The apostrophe is used for two things: to mark genitives (possessives) and to signal elision (leaving things out) in the case of contractions.

I can understand how confusion might arise in the case of the two homophones its and it’s.

It’s (contraction - it is) clear that it’s (contraction - it has) been difficult for people to determine whether or not the genitive pronoun takes an apostrophe since the rules for its (genitive) use might be difficult to discern. Pronouns generally don’t take genitive apostrophes (his, hers, theirs, ours, its) except in the case of one’s, and in instances involving singular pronominal noun phrases such as the girl’s bike and the boy’s ball so I can see how mistakes are made here.

I can also understand that it might seem tricky to place an apostrophe in plural genitive forms. In fact I know of someone who’s (contraction - who has) recently received a PhD and who’s (contraction - who is) giving a talk at Melbourne in the near future, whose (genitive) thesis contains a misplaced plural genitive apostrophe on the first page (and their abstract for their upcoming talk elides one completely) so even the best of us get that one wrong.

Whilst it might be the case that a punctuation mark’s (singular genitive) rules are tricky to apprehend, this does not mean that we should disregard punctuation marks’ (plural genitive) proper usages in cavalier fashion.

There are some misusages, however, which are so patently obvious that they should leap out and scream ‘what am I doing here?’ - like the apostrophe in the title of this post.

Certainly we don’t hold everyone to strict normative punctuation standards. The bloke down at the fruit shop can misuse punctuation until the cows come home and it elicits no more than a chuckle from me to see orange’s for sale. But no one is looking to the fruit shop guy to set an example with respect to correct linguistic usage.

It’s another story, though, when we see such blatant misuses where an example should be being set. Like on Channel Ten last night - those paragons of linguistic exactitude whose craptacularity I’ve previously pilloried in a prior pejorative post.

Channel Ten were running a station promotion for an upcoming ‘television event’ (ahem) which seems to have something to do with alien abductions and some girl with prophetic powers. It involved interspersing a voiceover (probably in that particularly annoying echo-whisper that they seem to think makes any announcement especially exciting - I couldn’t tell as I mute the ads), with the following phrases in huge screen-filling letters, clearly intended for shock value.

Firstly, yes she is - no problem there - then no she’s not - so far so good - but then, travesty of travesties, she see’s the future.

What the … ? She see’s the future? They ran this ad several times during the night. Has no one at Channel Ten ever actually read a book?

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