I dedicate this essay to one of those Copernican moments of
spiritual life when a chance epiphany reveals the depths of some modest marvel
until then only superficially considered, and thus modifies or even obliterates
mental habits so long indulged as to seem innate. They are all the more to be savored because they are so
rare. I must look back four
decades for a close parallel to my recent aperçu
of the apostrophe. It must have been about 1970 that I blundered upon the
invaluable monograph of Dr. Margarete Braun-Ronsdorf entitled The History of the Handkerchief. I perhaps did not see a new heaven and
a new earth, but never again would I sniff at a modest textile accoutrement
apparently hardly less transformative in its invention than the wheel, the
stirrup, or moveable types. Such
achievements are nothing to be sneezed at.
This
past week David Adams, our man in New Hampshire, who frequently sends us
cultural gleanings he rightly suspects might otherwise escape our attention,
shared the good news coming from the west of England about the Mid Devon
Council deliberations. The good news, of course, was that the Council had
reversed itself on its policy, rashly announced earlier, regarding apostrophes. Several old, cast iron street signs
within the Council authority—in particular, that for the notorious “St. Paul’s
Square”—brazenly (or at least ferrously) included visible apostrophes that were
proving indomitable to the fashioners of GPS technology. Naturally the Council legislated the
removal of the apostrophes forthwith.
Gadgets
and gizmos are today’s idols of the market-place, and Asian electronics would
certainly have prevailed over our mother tongue had it not been for the
forceful and effective intervention of Mr. John Richards, founding president of
the Apostrophe Protection Society.
I don’t know Mr. Richards personally, but he is an inspiration to us all. He and his fellow Apostrophians
are fighting the good fight against the growing horde of punctuational
barbarians, who seem intent on abusing the generous easement allowing the use
of the apostrophe to indicate the plurals of figures and letters (see “Getting My
Historical ZZZ’s” [GLGT 5/1]) in a most slovenly fashion. They want to use it for any damned plural that comes along. A few of the most benighted seem to
think no letter s should lack its
apostrophic prelude.
Perhaps
people might use apostrophes more intelligently if they knew what an apostrophe
is: namely, a labor saving device invented by efficiency minded medieval
scribes. Mrs. White taught me that
the apostrophe was “the sign of the possessive”. That was all well and good so far as it went. The
man has a horse.
The man’s horse is
white. In general, the once
robust declension of English nouns has become dull and flaccid, but there is in
that ’s at least the memory, wreck,
or relic of a perfectly good Old English genitive (“possessive”) singular: mannes. “Womman,” in the
memorable words of one of Chaucer’s talking chickens, “is mannes joye and al his blis.”
...ye's, well, almo'st all...
Where
did the apostrophe come from? If
you were a medieval Latin scribe, you got tired of repeatedly writing out in
full certain very common prefixes (such as con-,
cum-, pre-, pro, praeter- and
many others), which could easily be indicated by convenient short-hand signs. Common “case endings” in noun
declensions (orum, arum, inis, and so forth) could also be usefully abbreviated. Some medieval Latin manuscripts are
virtual abbreviation orgies, and nearly impossible to read. The standard scholarly manual (A.
Cappelli’s Dizionario di Abbreviature
latine ed italiane) is more than 500 pages long. One very common case ending (-us, as in the imaginary Latin hocus
pocus, mediocus) was one of several
abbreviated with a pen stroke approaching the modern “apostrophe”: hoc’ poc’. Jesus=Ies’.
Thus
did the apostrophe come to signify a dropped letter or letters. One very odd thing is that for a time
the convention continued in some printed
books. Chaucer in the fourteenth
century wrote mannes (two syllables,
voiceless s). Milton in the first line of Paradise Lost (seventeenth century)
writes “Of Mans first disobedience…” [pronounced manz with voiced s, one
syllable, no apostrophe]. Very soon the “correct” form became man’s, but with only an elite few having
much of a clue about the habits of medieval scribes or any “missing letter”.
There
are a few other interesting survivals of medieval scribal practice. A horizontal line (macron, or “long”
mark) above a consonant doubled the consonant. The same sign above a vowel signaled a following nasal. This is the origin of the Spanish tilde
in words like año (year). Indeed ñ eventually achieved its own independent status in the Castilian
alphabet. The medieval practice is
more clearly preserved in Portuguese, as in the national capital, Lisbõa, and
the name of the greatest of Lusitanian poets, Luís de Camões.
The
names of the punctuation points
generally derive from the compositional elements to which they were related by
early grammarians. Thus the period related to the sentence, while
the comma (Greek for “segment” or
“clause”) to a discrete element of a sentence. The Greek colon (member)
was a smaller part yet. The
surname of Christopher Columbus in Italian was Colombo, but its Spanish version
was Colón (Cf. the capital of Panama), a fact that allowed him to exercise his
wit in constructing a mystical or kabbalistic “signature”.
[colon] XpistoFERENS = Cristóbal Colon
The etymology of apostrophe
itself is complex, as two distinct ideas have been confused in a single
word. As a rhetorical term an
apostrophe was a speaker’s “turning aside” to address some abstraction or
nobody in particular: “O Death, where is thy victory?” But it was also an elision of letters,
and then the sign of such ellision [ ’ ].
Newspaper
accounts suggest that John Richards may build on his political triumph in Devon
by founding a Comma Protection Society.
I could get behind that, though far more urgent is the need for a
Sodality of the Semi-Colon. Now
there’s a truly endangered species.
