Misusing an Apostrophe is not a Catastrophe

The Greek dramatic device called a strophe has spawned a number of words, some of which I knew and some of which I have learned in preparing this week’s post.

In ancient Greek tragedy, when the chorus first began singing an ode it moved from right to left, before it would turn and head back left to right (the antistrophe). Strophe comes from the Greek word strephein which means “to turn.” It came into English in about 1600.

So it isn’t difficult to get from strophe, a dramatic turn, to catastrophe, another dramatic turn.

Catastrophe, which now refers to a widespread disaster, also can mean a negative reversal, or a reversal of expectations. It is formed from adding the Greek kata- (meaning “down”) to strephein, thereby forming katastrephein, which to the Greeks meant to turn down or overturn or come to an end. In fact, it originally referred to, according to etymonline.com, “especially the fatal turning point in a drama”, which sounds to me like the ending of Romeo and Juliet. The Romans adopted the word from the Greek, changing its spelling in Latin to catastrophe, from which in the 1530s the English brought it into use. Its (not it’s – see below) first use to describe a sudden disaster in English took place in 1748, although the disaster of note isn’t mentioned.

Another word we get from strephein is apostrophe. Formed by adding the Greek prefix meaning “from”, apo-,  apostrophe meant the mark to indicate a letter taken from a word when it arrived in English in the 1580s. An apostrophe is still the punctuation mark used to indicate a missing letter, but it also is used in the possessive form of a noun. The opening paragraph today uses an apostrophe to indicate the possessive form of week in describing this post. The penultimate word of the preceding paragraph illustrates the missing letter use of apostrophe: the apostrophe indicates the commonly used contraction “isn’t” for the words “is not.”

Apostrophe had a more tortuous path to English than catastrophe did. Also being formed in Greek (as apostrephein), then adopted into Latin, by the time of Late Latin it had the form apostrophus, which the Middle French adopted as apostrophe and the English took without spelling change.

An aside – in the 1530s the word apostrophe was first used in English to describe an orator’s turning aside from the crowd to speak to an individual. In formal rhetoric it retains this meaning.  

While an apostrophe is used to indicate a possessive noun, an exception is the possessive neuter pronoun its. Originally the possessive of it was it’s, but since the possessives of other personal pronouns (hers, theirs, yours) don’t use the apostrophe it only made sense that "it" followed suit. And its use without the apostrophe helps distinguish it from the contraction “it’s.”

I say “helps.” The misuse of the apostrophe with the pronoun it is a common grammatical error to this day, even though the change has been in common use (and misuse) since the early 19^th century. But it's not a catastrophe.