It was a modest proposal to ditch the humble apostrophe. Who’d’ve guessed it’d cause such a fuss? Not the officials in southwestern England whose idea it was to abolish the smudgy little punctuation ...

Apostrophes aren’t used to show possession in German in most cases, but the highest authority on the language is changing that. Here’s the scoop on the English ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ - and why critics ...

The apostrophe is out to get you. That innocent-looking little punctuation mark you learned about in elementary school has been plotting against you all your life. It’s not like the hyphen, which is ...

The big story in my hometown of Rockford this week is the teachers strike — or should that be “teachers’ strike.” Should “teachers” take the possessive form or not? First, a word about terminology, ...

Mark Twain’s encounter with a particular foreign tongue inspired an essay called “The Awful German Language.” Welcome to a new feature of this column. We won’t call it “The Awful English Language.” ...

Possession, contractions, plurals – test your ability to use an apostrophe in our fun and completely pedantic quiz This week there were reports that residents of North Yorkshire were irked that their ...

Meghan Walbert is Lifehacker's Managing Editor. She has a degree in journalism and has worked at Lifehacker as a writer and editor since 2018, covering parenting, foster care, online child safety, and ...