Dinesh's photos with the keyword: Oliver Kamm

apostrophe The apostrophe is a useful mark in denoting possession and distinguishing the genitive singular and plural. The genitive is generally formed by adding an apostrophe and the letter 's' to the noun. For singular noun, the apostrophe precedes the 's' (as in the author's book). For a plural noun that ends in s, the apostrophe comes after it (as in the politicians' debate). For a plural noun that does not end i 's', you add an apostrophe followed by an 's' (as in the 'people's demands'). Possessive pronouns can function as either adjectives or nouns. The possessive adjectives are 'my, your his, her, our' and 'their.' The possessives 'yours, hers, ours,' and 'theirs' do not take apostrophes. The apostrophe is also useful in indicating an elision in a contracted word, such as 'don't' or 'haven't' (Though not everyone agrees. Shaw dispenses with it in early editions of his plays, only to find that actors stumbled over the pronunciations of 'we'd' when spelt as wed, or 'can't' when spelt as cant.) Those are the conventions. Every so often there's a manufactured controversy in publiv life when sticklers discover loose or non-existent observance of the apostrophe. There's even something called the Apostrophe Protection Society that reliably kicks up a kerfuffle about street signs that omit the apostrophe. When it belatedly discovered that the famous Princes Street in Edignburgh had, till the 1820s, been known as Prince's Street, it doltishly demanded that he street's 'lazy, ignorant and appalling' signs be altered to that previous name. The genitive (or possessive) apostrophe is a grammatical anomaly in English and its conventions are quite a recent development the apostrophe entered the language (the form of it that we now all Early Modern English) from French in the sixteenth century, as a printer's mark to denote an elision. Its use to denote possession was, for centuries thereafter, must debated and highly inconsistent. ~ Page 131

Children are routinely scolded for using this word. Its condemnation is a perfect illustration, and perhaps the perfect one, of the vagaries of usage. The OED records its use in writing as 'an't' by the eighteenth century and as 'ain't by 1778. It is contraction of the same form as 'aren't,' ' isn't,' and 'hasn't', and it makes grammatical sense. Yet at some point it became a taboo word and has remained so. You can easily imagine an alternative universe in which 'ain't' became Standard and usage pundits condemned native speakers for sloppily failing to use it. Fowler comments sensibly: 'A(i)n't' is merely colloquial, and as used for 'isn't' is n uneducated blunder and serves no useful purpose. But it is a pity that 'a(i)n't' for 'am not,' being natural contraction and supplying a real want, should shock us as though tarred with the same brush. Though 'I'm not" serves well enough in statements, there is no abbreviation but 'a(i)n't I? for 'am I not?..." A pit indeed. Language doesn't follow logic, except its own, Aren't would be an alternative as in 'aren't clever?, yet I 'aren't clever' isn't standard English

English is a river. Its content is always changing and it has many tributaries. Its characteristics include impermanence. Indeed, there can be no single definition of the English language. This conclusion applies across history and across countries. It's not only the language that's different now. So are the speakers. In the middle of the last century, around 400 million people spoke English. The total is now 1.5 billion, while the proportion of them living in Britain, North America and Australasia has declined. There is no historical parallel for this growth in English usuage and the shift in the language's center of gravity. English has become a global language not through any inherent virtues but because of the political and economic power of successively the British Empire and the United States. ~