Date:         Tue, 12 Jun 2001 14:57:46 +0100
Reply-To:     Timothy Lee Harrison <tim@HARRISONLAND.CO.UK>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Timothy Lee Harrison <tim@HARRISONLAND.CO.UK>
Subject:      Re: Apostrophes & spelling (was Re: Sears disaster- BOZO's heh)
In-Reply-To:  <3B255856.7DD68EFD@mindspring.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 16:46 11/06/01 -0700, T Berk wrote:


>Hmmm, I thought it was Boz'i.

Nice one!

Seriously, though. An apostrophe denotes that something has been missed
out. For instance "they are" contracts to "they're", "he is"  contracts to
"he's" etc.

On the topic of ownership: the  Saxon genitive (e.g. "Tim's") denoted by an
apostrophe contracts from the use of the possessive  pronoun (e.g. "his").
Thus, a  Vanagon (to get on-topic again) belonging to me would (in an
earlier version of English) have been described as "Tim his Vanagon", which
then contracts to "Tim's Vanagon". "Ann hers map reading skills" becomes
"Ann's map reading skill" etc. Here, the apostrophe denotes ownership.

Commonly,  confusion occurs with the word "it's" and "its". Here, the  only
way to remember the correct spelling is to consider "it's" as a contraction
of "it is" - the possessive "its" has no apostrophe  - compare: "It's a
hard life" with "The Vanagon has a life of its own"

Use of the apostrophe to separate the "s" from the rest of the word for the
sake of clarity of reading is misuse and incorrect.

Tim