Rules for English Punctuation - The Humble Apostrophe
The apostrophe is universally misused. In that case, you may think that it isn’t a big deal if you don’t know where to place an apostrophe, but there are people who positively shiver at an apostrophe being misplaced and if they are your potential customers you don’t want to alienate them. Also, correct placement of the apostrophe is vital for anyone studying English. So, what does it do?
Well the apostrophe can signal several things. It is used to denote ownership of a noun. So in the phrase “the boy’s jacket” the jacket is the noun. We know it belongs to the boy because the apostrophe tells us so. If we said “the boys’ ships” then we know that there is more than one boy and more than one ship, so there are several boys and several ships. So when we are talking plurals, the apostrophe usually goes after the s. When it is singular, then the apostrophe is before the s. Simple.
But the humble apostrophe has more to do than this. It can be used to indicate time:
“In a month’s time” means that something is happening around about a month or four weeks from the date written.
It can also be used to indicate letters or figures that have been omitted. So we talk about the summer of ’69, or we write can’t, because in the first instance the apostrophe indicates that the century numerals have been omitted from the date (if written in full it would be the summer of 1969) in the second instance we write can’t because the apostrophe indicates that the word should be cannot, but an n and an o have been omitted.
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