Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Apostrophes have always been confusing. 'First' or 'firstly'? Trudy!

Episode Summary

1009. If you think apostrophes are confusing today, wait until you hear how people used them 100s of years ago! Ammon Shea has some wild stories. Plus, should you use "first," "second," and "third" or "firstly," "secondly," and "thirdly"?

Episode Notes

1009. If you think apostrophes are confusing today, wait until you hear how people used them 100s of years ago! Ammon Shea has some wild stories. Plus, should you use "first," "second," and "third" or "firstly," "secondly," and "thirdly"?

Ammon Shea is the author of "Bad English," "Reading the OED."

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Episode Transcription

Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. 

I'm still getting people asking me questions about how to make names that end with S possessive even though I did a show about it three weeks ago, included it in my newsletter, and posted about it on social media. So if you missed it, check out episode 1006, but I'm also hearing people lament that some mysterious "they" people have made apostrophes too complicated, which reminded me of a short interview I did way back in 2014 with Ammon Shea that had the title "Apostrophes were always confusing." I was going to just post it on social, but when I listened to it, I enjoyed it so much that I wanted you to hear it too. So that will be first, and then after that, I have a segment about whether you should use "first" or "firstly."

Apostrophes were always confusing

MIGNON: Next I have an interview with Ammon Shea, the author of one of my favorite new books, "Bad English." Hi, Ammon, thanks for joining me. 

AMMON: Thank you for having me. 

MIGNON: Really, I just adored your book. And in particular, I want to talk about the chapter about apostrophes. The source of never ending trouble. Right, people complain about them today, but your book says that people have been complaining about them for a really long time. 

AMMON: Right, it's something that's real constant. We have this idea at some point in the past, that it was a kind of utopian period of apostrophic normalcy or something, or what have you. And it's never been the case. Ever since their introduction into the language, apostrophes have kind of shifted and changed. And they've never been subject to any sort of agreement. 

MIGNON: And the French hoisted these upon us, is that right? 

AMMON: Well, the French are the Italians, since we're so fond of blaming other bad habits on the French. I think that many people go with that. There's MB Parkes who wrote a wonderful book, a comprehensive book on punctuation of the Western world called "Pause and Effect." He thought it came up first in a 1509 edition of an Italian book of Petrarch. Many people think, however, that Geoffrey Tory, who was a French printer, who also is responsible for introducing us to the cedilla and the accent, he used it in 1529 in French. So that was definitely in use by that point. 

MIGNON: So in the beginning, it was clear how to use the apostrophe? 

AMMON: Well, not quite. It's never actually been clear. It first came into English about 30 years later in 1559. And at first, it was really just used as a contraction or a mark of elision. We used it when we left out a letter, or several letters. So that was fairly clear. There was no definite rigid opinion on what letters could be left out or what couldn't be left out. But if you wanted to drop a letter in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word, you would use an apostrophe. Of course, we're also talking about a time period when some very small percentage of the population was actually literate. So for most people, the apostrophe had no great impact on their lives. 

MIGNON: Okay. And then you said, by the Restoration, people were getting completely carried away with this contraction idea? 

AMMON: Once you start using it, I guess it's kind of like crack, the apostrophe. It's kind of addictive. So there were people doing … Merriam-Webster dictionary of English usage has some wonderful examples of it. "I'fac" was found, which I am pretty sure means "in fact," my personal favorite was "'zbud," which is an abbreviated form of "God's blood." So you get a lot of words kind of like that. 

Of course, this is also at a point where spelling is not that consistent. So you mix an indefinite spelling system and the free use of apostrophes and things can get a little bit tricky. 

MIGNON: Yeah. I appreciated the interpretation you had of some of the words in your book because I never would have been able to guess. 

Yeah. It's not immediately obvious when you see "'zbud" that this is a shortening of a euphemistic kind of religious term. 

MIGNON: Right. And I was surprised to read that some people initially considered the possessive apostrophe to be an error. 

AMMON: Yeah. Well, it kind of came late to the party. I mean, one thing that's been noted is that in Shakespeare's first folio in 1623, only about 4% of the words that today we would give an apostrophe to in the possessive case like "Othello's," "Romeo's heart," only about 4% of those actually have an apostrophe. It was not very common at the beginning of the 17th century. It was a while for it to catch on. And there was confusion and some degree of consternation because people didn't really know what the apostrophe was doing there in the possessive or the genitive case. And this is before we figured out all the rules of English, which of course we haven't figured it out yet. 

But there was a great deal of … great number of misconceptions about the English language back then. And so some people thought that it was a mark of elision. So the "king's book," the apostrophe was the shortening of the "king, his book." And that was a kind of widespread theory for a while. And then some other people came along and more or less said, that's a very stupid idea. That's not the case. But people really disagreed about it vehemently. And then some people then think that what the apostrophe is doing is it's kind of harkening back to our old English roots. So it was common in the masculine and the neuter genitive cases. So "the king's book," for instance, to add an "-es" at the end of, you know, that would indicate possession. So if you look at it that way, well, sure, it makes sense. We're actually taking out the E and putting in an apostrophe. And that's why we have K-I-N-G apostrophe-S. It's a pretty good theory. I think a lot of people who pay attention to this, at least six or seven of them, subscribe to that theory. But there was no real agreement on that this was okay. 

And then when people started getting comfortable with it, some people would say, well, sure, we can do it for singular nouns. We can't do it for plural nouns. That's madness. I don't understand why they got so worked up about it. But it was a big deal. 

MIGNON: And was this in the 18th century? 

AMMON: Yes. Yeah. So grammarians were fighting about lots of things. They were fighting about the color of their socks. I mean, anything they could get a fight out of, they would grab. And none of them agreed with each other. People were writing entire books just attacking their predecessors' position on what to do with the genitive apostrophe in a singular noun. I mean, they'd fight over anything they could. 

MIGNON: It was like the TMZ of grammar. 

AMMON: Yeah, right. 

MIGNON: And you say that even today the apostrophe is in flux. You point to how writing decades has changed. 

AMMON: Right. So several decades ago, no pun intended. If you wrote, say, the 1950s, you would write "1950's." That is generally not the case now. So that's just a blink of an eye. I mean, something changing in 30 years. That's nothing in terms of the history of the language that we're looking at. For instance, a lot of department stores have started dropping the apostrophe. 

The famous British store whose name I always mispronounce. They're Harrods or Harrods, whatever Harrods I believe. They stopped using an apostrophe a little while ago. Macy's over here still holds on to their apostrophes. They're very fond of them. But I just noticed today that Marshall's department store does not use an apostrophe. And I'm pretty sure that they used to. It was started by a man whose last name was Marshall. So Marshall's probably means that it's his store. I've seen a number of old newspaper articles referring to Marshall's department store where it did in fact have an apostrophe. This is in 1971. And I think that some of these stores just kind of realized, well, we don't really need it. I mean, it's not doing us any substantial good. It's taking up real estate. So let's stop using it. I think it would not be surprising if this were to happen more and more frequently given that we do not use apostrophes in typing out URLs. So, it's kind of, once you see that you don't need it, then it's very easy to do away with it in other contexts, I think. 

MIGNON: Right. It's a character. If you're trying to hit 140 characters on Twitter. 

AMMON: Right. Yeah. Exactly. 

MIGNON: So to end, you say that we're even flummoxed by how to pronounce the word "apostrophe." And we're all getting it wrong. So set me straight? 

AMMON:Well, yeah, that's my thing that I say. If anybody does correct you on how you use your apostrophe, you can always turn around and correct them on the way that they pronounce it. The current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary no longer says this, but the first edition of the OED. They had a kind of peevish and quarrelous editorial note, one of the very few that they have in that dictionary under apostrophe, where the editor James Murray said that it should be pronounced as the French pronounce it, which is apostrophe. And three syllables rather than four with the emphasis on the final syllable. Apostrophe. 

MIGNON: And you would know because you also wrote a book about the OED, right? Which is where I would have seen it. 

AMMON: Right. 

MIGNON: What was that called again? 

AMMON: It was called, it had a very unimaginative title, which was "Reading the OED."

MIGNON:  Wonderful. 

AMMON: Thank you so much. 

MIGNON: And now your new book is "Bad English." Again, that was Ammon Shea, the author of "Bad English." Thanks so much for being here. 

AMMON: Thank you for having me. 

MIGNON: You're welcome. 

'First' or 'Firstly'?

by Mignon Fogarty

Hi, Mignon. This is Rick, and I'm an academic surgeon and a logophile. And I have two questions for you which have been rather elusive for me as I do a lot of speaking and writing.

The first is related to enumeration of points. So although it's in common usage, we typically hear "first there's this" and "second there's that."

But I've heard in some cases I've read it should be "firstly there's this" and "secondly there's that." So that's my first question.

So I'm going to jump in here and answer this first question:

The short answer is that most usage guides today recommend "first," "second," and "third," simply because they're shorter and sound less fussy than "firstly," "secondly," and "thirdly."

But I found some interesting things as I was checking my books to make sure I was remembering correctly.

First, people have been writing about how much they dislike "firstly" since the mid-1800s according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage — at first because they thought it was new. For example, Thomas de Quincy said it was a "ridiculous and most pedantic neologism." But he was wrong about that: people had been using "firstly" for 300 years. But no matter! Eventually, in more modern times, usage guides have settled on the "it's better because it's shorter" rationale.

Second, "firstly" is used more often in British English than in American English. At peak "firstly" usage in 1940, a Google Ngram search shows that "firstly" was used 1200% more often in British English than American English. But it's fallen a lot since then, and in 2021, British use was only 160% higher than American use. So still more, but not so dramatically more.

Now, "firstly," "secondly," and so on aren't wrong, so if you want to use them, you can, but my advice is to be consistent and not mix them. I'd say don't use "first" and then "secondly," but surprisingly, that doesn't seem to be universal advice or something that famous writers always pay attention to. For example, Merriam-Webster has a section going through the ways that well-known writers have just used different forms together willy-nilly. For example, William Hazlitt, a prominent essayist and critic from the 1700s, used the series "first of all," "secondly," and then "in the third place." 

And lest you think "Oh, that's just the old timers," Garner's Modern English Usage — which does also recommend "first," "second," and "third" — also says, "many stylists prefer 'first' over 'firstly' even when the remaining signposts are 'secondly' and 'thirdly.'" Wow, I would never prefer that, but apparently others do.

And he also adds that using just "one," "two," and "three," can be done but that it sounds especially informal. 

And to finish, I'll tell you a funny thing about my own writing that popped up when I was working on my last LinkedIn Learning course — I apparently often start a section with "first" and then never get to a "second" and "third." That's not terrible — you can use "first" as a general introductory word — but Pat was listening to me record and asked a couple of times why I didn't have the rest of the numbers for my follow-up points. So if you tend to do this too, and you want to avoid a few people wondering where your "second" and "third" are, you can lead-in with something else like "to begin with," which has less of a sense that you're starting a numbered list.

So thanks for the question, Rick. That's probably more than you ever thought there was to say about the topic, but the Quick and Dirty Tip is to stick with "first," "second," and so on.

Also, Rick's second question was a bigger one about quotation marks, and Rick, if you're listening — first, thanks for the questions, and second, I'm just going to direct you to Episode 740 from 2019, which is a complete overview about double and single quotation marks. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Familect

Finally, I have a familect story.

Hi Grammar Girl, Mark from England here.

As soon as you mentioned the WhatsApp chat link, I thought I'd send in my familect. This one started many years ago in our family.

There used to be a sponsored advert before a soap opera by a popular chocolate brand. In the ad, they're making a TV show, and while they're filming, one of the production staff, called Trudy, wanders onto the set daydreaming while eating the chocolate bar.

The director exclaims, "There's someone on the set, Trudy!"

Ever since then, if any of our family are trying to take a photo or video, and one of us gets in the way of the camera, we'll shout "Trudy!" as a shorthand to get out of the way.

Love the show, and well done in over a thousand episodes.

Thanks so much, Mark, and thanks for sharing your story.

If you have a familect story to share, I'd love to hear it, and now you can record a voice memo for me in the chat on WhatsApp, which generally makes the audio sound better than the old voicemail line. The link is in the show notes, and be sure to use the voice chat feature, not the phone feature. 

Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Holly Hutchings in digital operations; Davina Tomlin in marketing; Morgan Christianson in advertising; Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; and Dan Feierabend in audio, who "gamercizes" daily with his VR headset.

And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.

That's all. Thanks for listening.