Chris Higgins
Apostrophe Atrophy
by Chris Higgins - March 17, 2008 - 2:46 PM

I’m a sucker for any hyper-specific blog about typography, grammar, even handwriting. Anything to do with words or word-nerd stuff, really. Witness: my recent post on The Lowercase L, my longtime devotion to “misused” quotation marks, and some awesomely smart signs. Today allow me expand your nerdy typographic horizons with Apostrophe Atrophy, a blog about the misuse of “dumb apostrophes” and “dumb quotes.”

What’s dumb about an apostrophe or a quote? Well, Apostrophe Atrophy is referring to those “straight quotes” that don’t show the direction of the apostrophe or quote in question. In many word processing and design applications you have to turn on “smart quotes,” and it looks like many people just don’t go there. Apostrophe Atrophy collects examples of poorly-used dumb apostrophes in the wild, but also finds some amazing mixtures of the smart and dumb, for example:

The Wire - smart & dumb quotes

Update: by popular request, let me explain what’s wrong with the image above. Note how the quotes around “Wire” and “Evacuate” are curved (aka, smart), but the one within “Simon’s” is straight (dumb). See, I said it was hyper-specific.

I think I enjoy this type of blogging so much because there are many layers to each image: 1) A design/typographical mistake; 2) Technological issues (in this case, computers versus quotes); and 3) The actual content of the image in question, which is often pretty interesting: in the case above, the actual article is great stuff, despite the mix of smart and dumb quotes in its headline. This type of multi-faceted thinking definitely activates the Nerd Center in my brain. How about you?

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Comments (12)

  1. perhaps i’m just thick today, but i couldn’t figure out what was wrong with half of those apostrophes on the link. the picture with the t-shirt appeared right. it’s is a contraction for it is, so the sentence does make sense.

    could anyone enlighten me?

    posted by the creature on 3-17-2008 at 3:34 pm

  2. Proper apostrophes (and quotation marks) should be curved, and are called “smart.” Dumb ones are just straight up and down.

    posted by Higgins on 3-17-2008 at 3:37 pm

  3. Like the creature, I’m stumped. I’m confused by this whole post, and I don’t see what’s wrong with the image shown. Can you explain?

    posted by Craig on 3-17-2008 at 3:45 pm

  4. Okay, I’ve added a little explanation right below the image.

    posted by Higgins on 3-17-2008 at 3:51 pm

  5. I fought these for four years as a proofreader. I proofed pages of catalogs for companies that sold sports equipment, and I would see this all the time, but just the opposite. We used a lot of inch and foot marks on the pages, and it would drive me nuts to see smart quotes instead of inch marks, the latter of which are straight. I painstakingly went through all of our pages and carefully replaced all the smart quotes every time. Quark, the old publishing application, automatically imported them as smart quotes. So annoying.

    Inexplicably, the straight-up-and-down ones always ended up in the copy body in place of apostrophes. I was so close to going all proofreader on Quark’s ass.

    posted by Cheryl on 3-17-2008 at 4:21 pm

  6. Wow, this is too OCD for my taste.

    posted by Florida on 3-17-2008 at 4:33 pm

  7. A little off-topic, but I found a sign right down the road from me posted on that Signs of Life blog. There must be a kindred spirit nearby…

    posted by Sara on 3-17-2008 at 5:49 pm

  8. oooooooooooooohhh.

    i see it now.

    posted by the creature on 3-17-2008 at 6:26 pm

  9. And yet you accept the smart quotes around The “Wire” when the title of the show is “The Wire”. They don’t look like very smart quotes to me.

    posted by Case on 3-18-2008 at 12:43 pm

  10. I agree with Florida that this is some highly specialized stuff, but for those of us who have actually had to convert all of the quotation marks and apostrophes in pages and pages of printed material, it is very relatable. I was also a copy editor for three local newspapers, and anytime I would import anything from a Word document, I would get dumb quotes. (Thank you MS!) My boss there called them “hash marks” and would correct my copy editing by just writing “hash” on the dummies. Ugh – I do not miss that…

    posted by Anne on 3-19-2008 at 2:24 pm

  11. Thank you, Chris, for highlighting this! A wonderful book that I recommend to everyone is “The Mac is not a typewriter” (and there is a PC version too) by Robin Williams (author, not actor):
    http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-Professional-Level-Macintosh/dp/0938151312
    Cheryl raises an excellent point about about how smart apostrophes so easily become dumb ones and at the same time straight inches become curly quotation marks when you don’t want them to. Part of the culprit is Microsoft Word’s default settings. To correct this situation in Word go to Format > AutoFormat, click on Options and go through each tab (AutoCorrect, AutoFormat as you type and AutoFormat) unchecking the Replace \Straight quotes\ with “Smart Quotes”. This allows you to use straight inches and feet symbols and when you hold down the Option/Alt key while clicking on the curly bracket keys you get all the smart quotes you need (Shift reverses the directions). I know that all sounds complex but once you get in the habit it really isn’t! Good luck:-)

    posted by Jeremy Sutton on 8-21-2009 at 3:57 pm

  12. I just can’t help but comment on the irony here: Jeremy Sutton’s comment about how simple switching to smart quotes is is full of instances of a lower-case a with a circumflex, followed by a Euro sign and a third character that is either an oe ligature, a trademark sign, or a boxy thing representing unknown character not available in this font, where it seems was intended one or the other sort of inverted comma. All other comments show up fine.

    Things get a lot more “complex” when you have to check to see if your intended reader has the correct encoding. Personally, I’ll take the dumb quotes any day, heck at this point I’d rather review a contract entirely in unantialiased 9-point Comic Sans if the alternative was to put up with more smartquote misformatting garbage on my screen every time I had to look at a defined term.

    posted by Matt on 12-14-2011 at 11:15 pm

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