Christmas isn’t the only time you see ’em, but they come out more often during the holidays.
No, I’m not talking about elves.
They drive proofreaders—or in my case, former typographers—absolutely nuts: inverted initial apostrophes.
Headlines joyfully, albeit incorrectly, proclaim, ‘Tis the season!
Only they don’t use the correct punctuation. It should be written, ’Tis the season!
There’s only one way to write an apostrophe—this way: ’. The other way (‘) should only be used to start a nested quote, or a quote within a quote.
For example: Tom said, “My father would always tell me, ‘Son, don’t believe everything you read in the papers.’ He was a wise man.”
People also often mess up on apostrophes when shortening dates: The stock market crashed in ‘29.
The correct way to shorten the year 1929, of course, is ’29.
Some programs now correct the apostrophe automatically if it precedes two digits, as in, World War II ended in ’45. But it’s not a universal feature.
I recently saw the ‘80s written in a respected national publication, and ‘Cause we can! in a social media advertisement for a big U.S. city.
Part of the problem is that it’s a challenge to make an initial apostrophe the correct way using a word processing program.
For years—make that decades—I would fool the program by typing a character before the apostrophe, and then deleting it: I’Tis the season to be jolly. If you delete the initial character, the apostrophe stays the way it should be.
But then I recently learned an easier way. On a Mac, if you hold down the Option + Shift and type ], it will give you a perfect apostrophe every time.
On Windows, it’s Alt + 39 on the numeric keypad. Or so I’m told. I’m an Apple kinda guy.
But it sure would be a wonderful Christmas present to writers and editors the world over if some smart programmer could make our computers automatically correct inverted apostrophes, or at least flag them as possible typos.
If you know any, please send ’em a link to this article.
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