apostrophe

[Arnold Zwicky]

> On 4 Jul 2010, at 2:17 PM, David Barnhart wrote:
>
>> A couple of years ago I remember seeing a large banner over the main
>> entrance to Vassar College which read:
>>
>>
>> Welcome Class of '10
>>
>>
>> Written with a single open quote rather than an apostrophe.  Each
>> year since it is the same.

with a reply: On Jul 5, 2010, at 8:18 AM, Barbara Need wrote:

> How could you tell? (In the font I read this in open single quote and
> close single quote/apostrophe are identical.)

indeed. DB is apparently assuming that "smart quotes" are the only correct glyphs in this usage, while "plain quotes" (straight up-and-down marks, with no bendy bits and no "heads" on them) are in fact what is used in many publications, indeed absolutely required in some. (Language Log used to use a host that even refused to *recognize* smart quotes, so that if you composed something in a word processor that supplied smart quotes automatically -- like, for god's sake, *Microsoft Word* -- or if you cut-n-pasted from a source that used smart quotes, the result would appear on other people's screens with the little blue Questioning Diamonds of Death sprinkled all over it. the LLoggers spent far too much time warning each other what had happened and laboriously editing other people's stuff for them.)

there are four glyphs of the single-mark variety and four of the double-mark variety. in the character tables on my Mac, the single-mark guys have the names
  APOSTROPHE (a single "plain quote")
  LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (with the head at the bottom)
  SINGLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK (with the head at the top)
  RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (with the head at the top)
and the double-mark guys have the names
  QUOTATION MARK (a double "plain quote")
  LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
  DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK
  RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
(there are, of course, Unicode and UTF8 codes for each of these.)

note that these names give the precedence of simplicity to the plain quotes, no doubt because these are the ones (and the only ones) provided by ordinary typewriters. (when you use a keyboard these days and hit one of the two plain-quote keys, most word processing software will automatically translate it into the smart quote appropriate for the context, including using RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK for the apostrophe. digression: that then produces problems when you want a RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (rather than APOSTROPHE) to stand for a word-initial apostrophe-of-abbreviation, as in "Class of '01" or " 'n" for reduced "and"; your software will automatically select the character LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, and you have to defeat its default one way or another. i usually type some random letter first, then the punctuation mark, so that i get a RIGHT, or closing, SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, then the rest of the word, and then go back and delete that dummy letter at the beginning.]

[another digression: the discussion above is deliberately simplified to fit the exchange between DB and BN. there's another style of smart quotes in which they are simple slanted lines rather than bendy marks with heads. left and right are still distinguished, by the direction of the slant, but the glyphs are otherwise without ornament, so these are what you get in some sans-serif fonts. they too have their special names, but i'm too lazy to look them up.]

the choice between plain and smart quotes is otherwise an aesthetic one. lovers of smart quotes like the left vs. right visual distinction they provide, note that smart quotes (including RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK for apostrophes) were for very long time the only typographically acceptable characters (that's what was used in *books*), and find the plain quotes unpleasantly suggestive of technology and innovation. (Real Book People hate plain quotes.) lovers of plain quotes like their simple, spare, and unfussy look, and note that they can (usually) be used without any care for the font that will display them on someone else's screen (where they will count as part of "plain text" rather than "rich text").

arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org