Random thoughts on the early use of apostrophes

Apostrophes in plurals of nouns ending in s.

While looking in Google Books for early use of the spelling fetus (as opposed to foetus) in British books, I came across this, from the Transactions of the Royal Society, London, with its double use of apostrophes in plurals ending in s - species's and fetus's:

Philosophical Transactions (of the Royal Society), 1669

I had known that one of the early uses of the apostrophe was in plurals of certain words ending in vowels (see next section), but this one was new to me.

A ten-minute walk, ten minutes' walk - expressions with two nouns

Expressions with two nouns to talk about time, distance and other forms of measurement

Two basic patterns

In this post we take a look at using expressions of time, distance, money etc when we use a number with a noun, before another noun, for example:

ten + minute + walk

There are two basic patterns we can use:

The do’s and don'ts of apostrophe use

No area of punctuation seems to give native speakers more problems than the apostrophe; a 2008 survey found that nearly half of the UK adults polled were unable to use it correctly. And no area of punctuation seems to cause people to get so hot under the collar at what they see as its ‘abuse’. There are even societies and websites devoted to to protecting it, and exposing the dastardly attacks on this fine and noble (but rather unimportant) little punctuation mark.

Some shops, such as Tescos, have just given up completely and consigned the apostrophe to the dustbin.

Yet the rules for using it are remarkably simple and (mainly) uncontroversial.

Nearly everything you want to know, and some things you probably don't want to hear, about apostrophes

• Contractions quiz
• Possessives quiz
• Possessive determiners and pronouns quiz
• Confusing words quiz
• Apostrophes quiz
• Annotated rant
• 2 Vocabulary quizzes
• Lots of links