I went and undid about two weeks’ worth of healing in my left little toe today, whacking it against my little suitcase in the bedroom: one of those whacks that immediately communicates that damage has occurred.
As I limped back from a quite nice Thai dinner with David, we somehow got onto the topic of the otiose apostrophe that infests much too much science-fiction and fantasy nomenclature, from the truly linguistically clueless (whose numbers are legion) to the authors who really ought to know better (Peter S. Beagle, I’m staring straight at you, man). I think David started the subject, to distract me from the (really quite significant) pain.
The question being, where the seven hells did the damn thing come from?
Dunsany didn’t use it. William Morris didn’t use it. Tolkien sure as hell didn’t. The earliest attestation we could think of offhand was Leigh Brackett (Eric “N’Chaka” Stark). So it doesn’t seem to be traceable to a genre source—again, our offhand and unsupported opinion. Where, then?
David suggested that Wade-Giles transcriptions of Chinese might be the source from which genre hacks cribbed the apostrophe. Me, I was born into the pinyin age, so I would never in a million years have thought of that—but it seems not entirely implausible; certainly China was in the newspapers enough to burn the apostrophe into linguistically-insensitive brains.
Still doesn’t explain the adoption or diffusion pattern. Does anybody know any more than we do?
