Leave ‘Gotcha!’ attitude to bad ‘80s movie

JUNE CASAGRANDE

With great power comes great responsibility. With the power that

comes from knowing a little something about grammar, spelling and

punctuation comes the responsibility to stay off your high horse. And

with the power of having your own column comes the responsibility to

promote sane use of power.

With that last one in mind, here’s a directive I fear I should

have issued a long time ago: Only use your grammar power for good,

never for evil. And if you do use it for evil, be sure it’s not

directed against one of my friends, as a foolish reader recently did

when she left on the voice mail of education reporter Marisa O’Neil a

message that went a little something like this:

“You’re the educational editor. In the headline of your story

today: ‘UC Irvine might demand more A’s,’ there’s an apostrophe after

the A and there shouldn’t be. You really should know better. The A is

not possessive. I hope that helps you out.”

I hate to admit what a thrill I get when people who do this are

wrong, but this woman was so wrong it kind of steals my thunder

because it’s hard to know where to begin. For example, no matter how

many times Marisa might play the message for her bosses, it doesn’t

seem likely that they’re going to increase her salary from that of a

reporter to an editor. Of course, if she were an editor, she might

actually have a hand in writing headlines, which reporters do not.

But the most glaring of Ms. Anonymous’ errors is the fact that the

headline was correct.

As Ms. Anonymous and I’m sure you, too, know, apostrophes are used

mainly to form possessives: “The caller’s ignorance.” “The caller’s

undeserved sense of superiority.”

But, like most punctuation marks, they often serve more than one

function. Sometimes they’re used to form contractions: “She’s way

off.” “She’d do better to keep quiet.”

And still other times, apostrophes are needed to avoid confusion

when creating plurals, such as, “Mind your p’s and q’s,” or, “Most

educational editors have M.A.’s.” If you’re not sure whether to use

the apostrophe in a cases like this, try it first without one. If

your possessive looks odd, or especially if it creates another word

such as “as,” try it with the apostrophe.

The purpose of punctuation is to help make a writer’s message

clearer, not to play “gotcha” with every little mistake one might

come across (or nonmistake, as was the case here).

That kind of attitude is, in my opinion, the worst foe of good

English. I spent most of my life certain that there were two kinds of

people in the world: Those who “know” grammar and those of us who

should be afraid and ashamed to even try to speak in front of the

others. The snobs and the slobs, as it were. What I found out when I

started working in news is that the people who really know their

stuff are usually the last ones to act the know-it-all. They know

enough to know that no one knows enough (if you know what I mean).

So, demonstrating that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,

the half-baked grammar snobs bully the rest of us into believing they

know more than they really do and at the same time convince us that

our own ignorance is beyond hope.

That may be a good way to take jabs at people like Ms. Anonymous,

but it’s no way to treat your educational editor.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

JuneTCN@aol.com.