Taylor Swift's Missing Apostrophe
/So few of us care about apostrophes—until Taylor Swift gets grammar policed. Maybe students would be interested in debating how her new album title is, or isn’t, punctuated.
We know the arguments. In The Tortured Poets Department, as it stands, without an apostrophe, poets is an adjective describing the department. A New York Times writer reminds us the same construction was used for Dead Poets Society (although he puts the album and movie titles in quotes; shouldn’t they be italicized?). With an apostrophe before the “s,” the department belongs to one poet; with an apostrophe after the “s,” it belongs to more than one.
I confess to delivering an Association for Business Communication presentation on the apostrophe a few years back. I was aghast and then became obsessed with an apostrophe in the possessive its in early drafts of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (see below). Not my best presentation but probably not my worst either. (Spoiler alert, as though you’re on the edge of your seat: Thomas Jefferson was what Bill Bryson called an apostrophist. The word is, after all, possessive. More here, by William Safire in 1986.)
In Taylor Swift’s case, consensus seems to be that poets as an adjective works just fine—and that Swift can do whatever she wants.
