By Barry's beard!

AND the student said, bold as a first-year: “You don’t know what you are talking about, Chindu. I have done my A-levels. And that’s not what they taught us!”

Actually, the student didn’t say quite that. But if I were to summarise the response I get when I talk about the apostrophe, that’s how I would put it.

In my three years of marking student work, nothing has given me more pain than the apostrophe: my teeth are all gnashed-out now, and I think I am in need of an urgent hair transplant. Good grief, how difficult is it to grasp it’s is a bit different from its? And your and you’re are not really the same?

I digress. It’s not such mundane usages I want to pick on today. What gets my goat more is how the poor 'postrophe is used to ‘drop’ –- the purpose English printers adopted it for originally -– a certain s in a certain possessive. Let me take you to my classroom…

"Barry Richards’s beard, is that correct?" I say. "Or should it be Barry Richards' beard?"

"Barry Richards' beard,” they say confidently. "You don’t need the second s."

"Actually," I say, "you do need the second s."

Which is when my students tell me I am rubbish. Sometimes, seeing me all crestfallen, the sensitive among them offer me an honourable exit.

"It’s up to you," they say soothingly. “You can keep the s if you want, Chindu -- it’s a matter of choice."

Beg your pardon. It’s not a matter of choice.


THE rule is this. To indicate possession in a singular ending in s, you need an apostrophe and a second s. So it is Barry Richards’s beard and Bronwen Thomas’s beauty.

Think about it this way. If the beard belonged to Jim Pope, we wouldn’t write Jim Pope’ beard, would we? Nor would we think it entirely appropriate to put down Jim Pope’ beauty (not that Jim is lacking in beauty, mind). So I don’t think it is fair to deprive poor Barry and Bronwen their due just because they are richer by an s. Luckily, Lynne Truss agrees with me (Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2005, page 55). So does the University of Ottawa, the Purdue University Online Writing Lab, and Fowler’s (Fowler’s used to recommend dropping the second s, though I could be mistaken there).

Perhaps it would help if we looked at how the ’s came to indicate possession. English printers first used the apostrophe some time in the 16th century. Its sole purpose then was to show omission of letters, and thus it stayed for a fair few decades, while Shakespeare energetically dreamt up apostrophic dialogue for Hamlet and other worthies.

Till then –- and here I quote The Dreaded Apostrophe -- possession in English was shown by adding an es at the end of the word. Thus, if you wanted to write about the beard that belonged to Barry, you wrote Barryes beard.

Came the 17th century. The printers, bored silly with the es business, decided to drop the e. What do you do when you omit a letter? That’s correct, use an apostrophe. And thus came about the Barry’s beard we see today.

Things would have been simpler if they had stopped at that. But no, along the way, someone decided the possessive of plural words ending with an s needed modification. Take, for instance, the word parentses, which was now, apostrophically, parents’s. To write it with the second s, this someone decided, was a bit daft. So today we write parents’ house, not parents’s house.

Now I can’t for the life of me think why they didn’t do the same in the case of singular words as well. Perhaps they didn’t want to work the poor apostrophe too hard. Or they just liked to complicate things. But the fact is, they didn’t, and we are stuck with Thomas’s beauty and parents’ house –- and neither is a matter of choice.

Don’t think that’s it. There are exceptions to this rule as well (as if it wasn’t confusing enough). Jesus, for instance, doesn’t need an extra s. Nor does any name from the ancient world. And if a word ends with an iz sound, then again, no s after the ’postrophe. There’s more, but I will refer you to Truss’s (now this third s, I don’t like at all; doesn’t look nice typographically) excellent Eats, Shoots & Leaves.


LET me wind up with a final note. Is it 1920s? Or 1920’s? Most of us would go for the former. Some of us might also say the latter is incorrect -– and it is here I advice caution.

If I am not mistaken, not too long ago, ’s was used to indicate the plural of numbers (and also acronyms, for instance, CD’s, thus). Blame it on the printers again. Possibly this was because the typefaces they worked with weren’t as ‘clean’ as the ones we have now, plus the headlines those days were mostly in capital letters -- which was where the apostrophe came in, to stop letters from jumbling together.

Those days are over, luckily. Today, though ’s is used to indicate the plural of lowercase letters (for instance, p’s and q’s not ps and qs), to see it used with numbers or acronyms is unconventional. Unconventional, I say, but still in vogue, especially on the other side of the ocean -- the venerable New York Times, for instance, still continues with 1920’s.

Perhaps, in this particular case, it is a matter of choice.

P’rh’ps.

Don't sputter. Just say

THERE is this four-letter word in English that many of us are severely allergic to -- and no, this one doesn’t start with ‘F’.

‘Said’ is the word in question. The one we brush aside when we attribute direct speech.

It is too simple for us, too common. Where is plain plebian Said when compared to alleged, argued, articulated, averred, claimed, disclosed, declared, held, offered, opined, stated, and pronounced? And the 'action-packed' laughed, grimaced, cried, sputtered, spat, and spewed?

"Said," a reporter claimed, "is okay when you are attributing for the first time. But you can't keep saying 'said, said' all the time. The copy will become repetitive and monotonous."

"Said," disclosed another, "is too bland. It doesn't say anything."

Precisely. Said is neutral. And that is its beauty.

A long time ago I remember reading a clipping my editor-in-chief -- an elephantine gentleman with an elephantine memory for the published word -- passed around. It, well, said Said is a writer's best friend, and when a reporter uses anything other than Said, he is poking his nose in, colouring the quote.

This is not always acceptable, certainly not in newswriting -- objectivity and all the rest, you know. More than that, if it is a passable quote, the words should convey whether the speaker is disclosing/alleging/stating/laughing/sputtering, whatever.

At times we also end up conveying the wrong meaning when we opt for frilly attributory words. Take, for instance, the quotes above.

‘...a writer claimed’ goes the first, conveying our disbelief at what the writer has to say. We are thus telling the reader, hey, mate, this is what he says, but it ain't true.

The 'disclosed' in the second attribution, for its part, implies a revelation to the reporter. And since it is a revelation, it must be true, is the impression.

An editor at the Wall Street Journal had an effective way to handle such writers. Whenever he spotted funny stuff, he would call the writer in question to his desk. "Laugh me this sentence," he would say. Or "Sputter me this sentence."

Now that doesn't mean you don't communicate the speaker laughed when he said his say. Go ahead. Try attributing it differently, though: "...he said, laughing".

The reasoning Said should be used 'sparingly' to avoid repetition doesn't wash either. Because, Said is one of those invisible words. So non-intrusive, so low-key that we skim across it. Here's a bit of Hemingway -- I think we can take him for an authority on good writing -- to illustrate my point:

'No,' I said. 'There's nothing to say.'
'Good-night,' he said. 'I cannot take you to your hotel?'
'No, thank you.'
'It was the only thing to do,' he said. 'The operation proved--'
'I do not want to talk about it,' I said.

Five exchanges. Four Saids. Now let's try some fancy attribution and see where that takes us:

'No,' I seethed. 'There's nothing to say.'
'Good-night,' he wished me. 'I cannot take you to your hotel?'
'No, thank you.'
'It was the only thing to do,' he justified. 'The operation proved--'
'I do not want to talk about it,' I spat out.

What do you say?

Now please don't tell me Said works only for dialogue, in fiction. It works perfectly fine for captured conversation in non-fiction as well. Here's Michael Herr, one of the best war correspondents ever, exposing the psyche of a bunch of scared American youngsters in Vietnam trapped in a war they want no part of. From Khesanh, a piece he wrote for the Esquire in 1968:

Day Tripper heard the deep sliding whistle of the other shells first. 'That ain' no outgoin',' he said.
'That ain't outgoing,' Mayhew said.
'Now what I jus' say?' Day Tripper yelled, and we reached the trench as a shell landed ... A lot of them were coming in, some mortars too, but we didn't count them.
'Sure was some nice mornin',' Day Tripper said. 'Oh man, why they can' jus' leave us alone one time?'
'Cause they ain't gettin' paid to leave us alone,' Mayhew said, laughing. 'Slides, they do it cause they know how it fucks you all up.'

Stats? Let's dip into the work of two Pulitzer-winning journalists.

Michael Vitez, in the first chapter of his series Seeking a Good Death (1997, Explanatory Journalism), quotes some 1,200 words of speech, across 46 exchanges. He uses 2 'tells', 3 'askeds', 1 'agreed', 1 'insisted', 1 'flinched', 1 'concluded', '1 whispered', 1 'continued' -- and 36 Saids.

In his 3,828-word piece titled Final Salute (2006, Feature Writing), Jim Sheeler uses 27 complete direct quotations (about 700 words of it) to tell the story of a Marine major who helps the families of colleagues killed in Iraq to cope with grief. All 27 times he uses Said.

I think that says it all.

Hook me, I am available

AMAZING what happens when you throw a crusty old subject at a bunch of young minds and ask them to write. I did that a few times in the last two years and came away pleased.

The subject was always the same. Childishly simple, the kind you would expect to write an essay on in school: your hobby. Difference was, you needed to produce a feature article, a piece of creative non-fiction, informative and interesting, capable of carrying the reader through to the last word.

Result? Some very pleasant surprises (also some quite, um, unconventional use of punctuation and grammar, but more on that in another post), to prove, yet again, that there’s nothing called a boring topic. It’s how you tackle it that makes it boring -- or not.

Naturally, how you begin is crucial. So here’s a sample of beginnings I found interesting…

Helen Smale’s hobby is not reading, nor dancing, nor singing. It’s mentoring school kids. She begins thus:

I have just helped someone change his life. How? I went back to school.

Crisp. Dramatic. Now I want to know why, and how. She’s got me all right.

Mike Goodeve wrote about driving tests -- to be precise, how he routinely fails driving tests. That’s not really what you would call a hobby, but, hey, he got away with it. This is his reworked lead:

I have a hobby, a rather unusual one: I fail driving tests routinely.

I don’t know how long I will be able to carry on with it. But at the moment, I am giving it all I have got....

Point is, you can pull off darn near anything as a hobby (I remember a piece in Esquire magazine in which the writer decided to bargain for everything he bought, including hotdogs, then wrote this absolutely riveting piece on his haggling experience), provided you peg it up.

Leonie Wilson did something similar:

I have this hobby I love to talk about. In fact, I’ve made talking about it a hobby in itself. This is why I jumped at the opportunity when a stranger contacted me and asked me to talk to her about my experience last summer.

Enough suspense in there to get us reading. More about how she keeps us hooked, and what her hobby is, in the next post. Now for another interesting beginning, clever pegging, from Sophie Pascal, who didn’t think she had a hobby –- till she looked the word up…

This made me wonder what a hobby is. So I looked it up. The Oxford Dictionary describes a hobby as ‘a leisure time activity pursued for pleasure’.

In that case maybe I have a hobby. It’s not your average sporting hobby, but a highly developed fondness for cats. In my leisure time I enjoy cats and collect cat-related objects for pleasure … this must technically mean my immense love for cats is a hobby.

And now for another, from Katrin Kerber. Katrin’s hobby is video games, quite conventional compared to the ones we have discussed till now. She gets us with a saucy summary sentence:

In the last couple of days I slept with at least four guys, married a girl, stopped a restaurant from going bankrupt, helped a musician get into the charts, and became vice-president of a big company.

Gemma Gilbert works along the same lines. Here’s how she teases us in (lightly edited):

We’ve all done it, many of us more than once. Some of us do it in the bedroom. Some in front of mirrors. Some like to do it in clubs, with their mates watching.

Curious to know what she’s been up to? I was.

What makes these work? They grab my attention, one way or other, through surprise, shock, sheer sauce. You can also get me with information, description, action, conversation… anything really. Fact is, I am available. Up to you, how you hook me.