Apostrophes are equal opportunity humiliators. As I wrote recently, apostrophes incriminate less-word-savvy types by popping up in plurals like “We play bridge with the Smith’s” and “He had two ...

If you have a good grasp of apostrophes, you probably notice that a lot of other people don’t. You could be forgiven for rolling your eyes at sentences like “The dog wagged it’s tail,” which ...

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.” ...

The apostrophe can be used to show who things belong to. If an item belongs to something, the apostrophe shows us who, by sitting at the end of the noun. If that noun doesn't end in s, the apostrophe ...

Apostrophes are the curly floating commas in sentences that usually indicate possession or a contraction. There are a few set phrases and holidays, however, that also use apostrophes. In fact, ...

Until recently, apostrophes were used to form the plurals of abbreviations (MA's), dates (1980's) and words or characters serving as words (if's and but's). Today we don't use an apostrophe with the & ...

After VERIFYING how to spell canceled (with one l or two), a viewer asked us to VERIFY another grammar inquiry you might have been breaking for years. Beth Miller from Guilford County asked, "Why ...