ThinkBlog

Call me OCD, but people these days really don’t seem to understand the logic behind contractions. I don’t mean “don’t” and “can’t”; most native speakers of average intelligence can see why those are the way they are. But today I was in a class and a professor had a group of presentation slides on the same subject, flowing from one to another. So the guy has on the slides,

Subject Heading (con’t)

This shows a lack of understanding about the nature of the apostrophe and its function in a word. (Notice, as a related aside, that there’s no apostrophe in “its” here because that would signify a contraction of the being phrase, “it is” and not a neutered possessive singular pronoun.) Of course we all know that what my professor meant was to abbreviate the word “continued.” How would you do that? Like so:

cont’d

That’s because the apostrophe serves to signify content that has been omitted from a word, a phrase, or other language structure. If we take my professor’s example, we have nothing omitted where it is signified, and if we were to take this abbreviation literally, since it does not use a period (”cont.”), we would be left with a word that ends in `t’ and starts with “con”–with some indeterminate number of letters therebetwixt! Observe:

con[?]t.

Now note the structure of the logical reduction signified by the apostrophe in “cont’d”:

continued.

And, have mercy, this same concept applies to that aberrant member of the English language resting on so many Southern tongues like a plague, “y’all.” This contraction is almost invariably written as “ya’ll”. If you’re going to use this abbreviated version of “you all,” at least omit where omission is necessary. The reason for this being misspelled is most likely because “ya” is popularly being used as the auxiliary/slang second-person pronoun of indeterminate number (”you” v. “you”–either could be singular or plural). “Ya” is not a word in English, unless it’s a transliteration of the German affirmative (ja). So here note the examples:

ya’ll becomes ya all

Versus the following:

y’all becomes you all

Thank you, that is all.

Call me OCD, but people these days really don’t seem to understand the logic behind contractions. I don’t mean “don’t” and “can’t”; most native speakers of average intelligence can see why those are the way they are. But today I was in a class and a professor had a group of presentation slides on the same subject, flowing from one to another. So the guy has on the slides,

Subject Heading (con’t)

This shows a lack of understanding about the nature of the apostrophe and its function in a word. (Notice, as a related aside, that there’s no apostrophe in “its” here because that would signify a contraction of the being phrase, “it is” and not a neutered possessive singular pronoun.) Of course we all know that what my professor meant was to abbreviate the word “continued.” How would you do that? Like so:

cont’d

That’s because the apostrophe serves to signify content that has been omitted from a word, a phrase, or other language structure. If we take my professor’s example, we have nothing omitted where it is signified, and if we were to take this abbreviation literally, since it does not use a period (”cont.”), we would be left with a word that ends in `t’ and starts with “con”–with some indeterminate number of letters therebetwixt! Observe:

con[?]t.

Now note the structure of the logical reduction signified by the apostrophe in “cont’d”:

continued.

And, have mercy, this same concept applies to that aberrant member of the English language resting on so many Southern tongues like a plague, “y’all.” This contraction is almost invariably written as “ya’ll”. If you’re going to use this abbreviated version of “you all,” at least omit where omission is necessary. The reason for this being misspelled is most likely because “ya” is popularly being used as the auxiliary/slang second-person pronoun of indeterminate number (”you” v. “you”–either could be singular or plural). “Ya” is not a word in English, unless it’s a transliteration of the German affirmative (ja). So here note the examples:

ya’ll becomes ya all

Versus the following:

y’all becomes you all

Thank you, that is all.