It's not even ’10 and already I'm annoyed.
Granted, I'm annoyed year-round. But at this time of year, when, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, we are at once looking back at the old year and looking forward to the new, I've got a scowl on both my faces.
Folks, it's time to learn about apostrophes.
When abbreviating a year, remove the first two numbers and indicate the omission by using an apostrophe:
- 2009 becomes ’09 (not ‘09)
- 2010 becomes ’10 (not ‘10)
- 2525 becomes ’25 (if we're still alive)
Notice I said apostrophe, not single opening quote. In other words, if you see the little punctuation thingy curling toward the right, it's wrong. If its little tail is pointing left, it's right. Got that? (See above.)
Sadly, blog software like TypePad's automatically inserts straight quotes for all apostrophes and single quotes. You'll see that all the apostrophes in this post are straight, except for the ones I changed by manually inserting the html code.
So please, learn the code. My faces hurt.
Sighted. Cited.
"The top green stories of the ‘00s"
–Headline on the home page of Grist, December 31, 2009
You are my hero! Punctuation is such a little thing, why is it so hard to do correctly?
Posted by: Rae Davies | January 23, 2018 at 02:48 PM