Ticked off

It's a little thing, a stray little black mark. Blink and you might miss it. You probably don't give the apostrophe much thought. But I do.

True, I'm an editor and a writer by trade, and it's my job to know the official rules of punctuation and grammar and spelling. In English grammar there are only three, count 'em (see? there's one), three uses of the apostrophe: possession (Kieran's), omission ('em), and plurals (of single letters [a's] and literal strings [do's and dont's]). Period. No, apostrophe.

Some people get really bent out of shape about misused punctuation. One Brit even formed a society to protect apostrophes. I take the high road and mercilessly ridicule the offenders. Face it, I'm never gonna go to a tattoo parlor advertising "tattoo's"--because if they're that careless...

Lynne Truss, in her excellent and funny book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, writes about a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately posted ungrammatical signs in his shop window as a ruse to draw people in. When someone came into complain, he would talk them into buying something. Well, I won't have any of that. All right, maybe a little.

There's a fourth use of the apostrophe that has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned grammatical uses: its (not it's) appearance in Irish names. The letter O and the apostrophe in the name O'Leary is an anglicization of the Gaelic ua, meaning "grandson." When I was little I'd get tired of saying that really long word whenever I spelled my name: O-apostrophe-L-E-A-R-Y. When filling out data processing forms providing a single box for each letter, I'd make the apostrophe extra dark so it wouldn't get lost.

For most of my life I didn't have a problem with the little guy, but in the past 10 years, as electronic technology has taken hold, it's (not its) been slowly chipped away; sometimes, it's just not there.

The first time I got a credit card without the apostrophe I shrugged it off. As long as the omission did not affect my plural possession of things, I didn't care.

But then came the Internet. That was when my apostrophic birthright finally met its demise.

At work I was assigned an e-mail address containing the apostrophe. It looked odd to me, but I thought, well, that's the right spelling. I routinely sent and received e-mail with no problem. As part of my job I document interfaces and write users' guides. To gain access to a site I have to submit a form to the information services department and be approved.

The first time I filled out a form and tried to submit it, I got an error message: "Invalid input." I looked over the form and tried to figure out what was wrong. Did I type a date the wrong way or have too many digits in my phone number? It wasn't a very long form. I couldn't figure it out.

On a hunch, I deleted the apostrophe from my e-mail address and submitted the form. No error message.

Either the system couldn't handle non-alphanumeric characters, or someone had neglected to include all ASCII characters in their programming. Some programming languages and protocols reserve certain characters for functions and commands, and the apostrophe is usually one of them. I called the communications group (fearing my e-mail might get lost), explaining that I was never going to get approval for my access because I had an apostrophe in my e-mail address.

"Oh," the operator said. Silence. "I'll have to talk to the IT guys about this."

Turns out I was right. The Web server hadn't been designed to handle non-alphanumeric characters. So, now I have two e-mail addresses at work--one with the tick, one without. Technology 1, Me 0.

Test your knowledge of the apostrophe here.