Apostrophe catastrophe – Frank McNally on a vexed punctuation mark

There was a minor emergency somewhere in The Irish Times recently, I gather, after a rogue apostrophe gained entrance to the office and inserted itself in the name of a well-known charity, which was thereby rendered “Barnardo’s” (sic) in our print edition.
Pedantic readers may argue there is nothing roguish about that. But au contraire. Barnardos Ireland chooses to style itself thus, without the punctuation mark, to distinguish itself from Barnardo’s in the UK.
This was subsequently pointed out to the innocent reporter, who had in fact used the company’s style correctly before the unauthorised apostrophe somehow infiltrated.
Investigations are continuing, of course. In the meantime, the controversy reminded me that I pass the Dublin birthplace of Dr Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905) almost every day.
It’s on Dame Street – or used to be anyway. The location of the long-gone house is now marked by a plaque on the ground at the corner of a small square also now named after him.
So I stopped by there yesterday to check if the tourist information sign alongside it had an apostrophe. And well, it does and doesn’t.
The sign declares the place to be “Barnardo Square”. But in small print at the top is the attribution “Courtesy of Barnardo’s”, while in the text below it notes that “Barnardo’s no longer runs children’s homes . . .” All very confusing.
While there, I was intrigued to notice for the first time that the side-door of the adjoining building – City Hall – has an inscription in gold letters over it insisting that this is in fact “Dublin’s City Hall”, complete with possessive apostrophe.
This seems superfluous. After all, it’s unlikely anyone would mistake the venue for, say, Belfast’s City Hall. Or that agents for the People’s Republic of Cork would ever try to claim it as their own. Having said which, I also remembered that only a few metres from where I stood, Dame Street suddenly turns into “Cork Hill”. I suppose you can’t be too careful with those people.
Another thing I noticed in Barnardo Square, by the way, is the big banner currently draping the Dublin Tourist information Centre to advertise Féile Bram Stoker later in the month.
“Four days and nights of deadly adventures,” it promises. Which must be worrying if you’re an overseas visitor, unfamiliar with the non-fatal nature of deadliness in these parts. On a side issue, when we speak of fun involving vampires, surely the phrase should be “undeadly”?
Getting back to punctuation, just down from Barnardo Square, in the diminutive Palace Street, is one of Dublin’s most famous ghost signs, for “The Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers Society”, founded in 1790 and still going, but now located elsewhere.
That too could have had a possessive apostrophe, before or after the “s” in “Roomkeepers”. But it doesn’t, presumably because the word is used as a noun-adjective. And the lack of possessiveness may be doubly apt, given the charity’s original mission.
I used to think “sick and indigent roomkeepers” were hoteliers or guesthouse owners who had fallen on bad times. On the contrary, they were tenants of rooms, unable to keep paying the rent or even to feed themselves.
Hence the description of the society in one early 19th-century history book as having been founded: “by a few individuals in the middle ranks of life who], inhabiting a part of the town where the population was poor and crowded, had daily opportunities of knowing that many poor creatures who were unable to dig and ashamed to beg expired of want and were often found dead in the sequestrated garrets and cellars to which they had silently returned.”
Next door to the ghost sign is one of Dublin’s most picturesque restaurants, also devoid of possessive apostrophes because, like everything else about the café, its name is French: Chez Max.
That would be “Max’s Place” in English. But so far, the French have avoided a plague that has been afflicting German in recent years: the importation of redundant apostrophes from English.
German traditionally does not use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. Usage is changing, however. Where, for example, “Rosis Bar” and “Katis Kiosk” were once (and remain) correct, imitation of English has led increasingly to he likes of “Rosi’s Bar” and “Kati’s Kiosk” on signs instead.
This is decried as the “Deppenapostroph” (“idiot apostrophe”) by grammar enthusiasts.
But so widespread has it become that the official gatekeepers of Standard High German recently conceded defeat on the usage and declared it permissible.
Hardliners continue to be outraged. A columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung lamented acceptance of the apostrophe as part of a “victory march” by English.
Back in Dublin, meanwhile, Barnardos is marching in the opposite direction.
Grammarians may accept this reluctantly while hoping that the charity’s laid-off apostrophe never finds work in a nearby restaurant and changes the name to “Chez Max’s”.