Grimer Girl here, I'm Minyon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language, writing history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today I have a meeting middle about apostrophes, a tidbit about the word cipher and a family

story about not being distracted.

When I was in second grade, I lost a spelling bee because I misspelled the word it's.

I put an apostrophe in what I shouldn't have and it was a very traumatic moment in my

young life.

But I think this lesson is burned into my mind precisely because of my past misdeeds.

And although I can't change my past, I feel the next best thing would be to save all of

you from similar apostrophe-induced horrors.

Apostrophes have two main uses in the English language.

They stand in for something that's missing and they can be used to make a word possessive.

Apostrophes first showed up in the 1500s as a way to indicate omissions.

Today, the most common place to find this kind of apostrophe is in contractions such

as can't for cannot, that's for that is, and it's for it is or it has.

But they can also be used in fun ways.

If you're writing fiction, you might use apostrophes to eliminate letters to represent

a character's dialect.

For example, I saw him talking yonder with apostrophes to indicate that the speaker said

M instead of them and talk instead of talking.

Sometimes people call this I dialect, EYE, because it's a dialect that your eye can see

on the page.

...