A Word, Please: The single quote's busy season is here

Single quotation marks, if you recall, are used for quotations within quotations: “Stop saying ‘dude’!” They perform the same function as regular quotation marks, indicating verbatim speech or calling attention to specific words.

Like garden-variety double quotation marks, they need not curve at all. But when they do, they curve around the words they enclose. So an opening single quotation mark curves with the opening to the left, like the letter C, and a closing single quotation mark curves in the direction opposite C.

An apostrophe, when it curves, opens to the left — the opposite of the letter C. So, technically, a software program that curves your apostrophe to the right is inserting a punctuation mark you never intended.

This is pretty nitpicky stuff. But for us proofreaders, finding and correcting these is part of the job. For example, it comes up a lot in truncated decades like “the ’80s.”

In fact, that’s about the only time this unintended single quotation mark crops up — in decades. It’s almost never a problem with actual words, except a certain jolly time of year when a certain variation on “it is” enjoys an annual surge of popularity.

That’s why right now ’tis the season of minor apostrophe errors.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.