Dec 12 2007
Decades and Apostrophes
Let’s start with a quiz. Which of the following is correct?
1. We did better in the 1990’s than we did in the 80’s.
2. We did better in the 1990’s than we did in the 80s.
3. We did better in the 1990s than we did in the 80’s.
4. We did better in the 1990s than we did in the 80s.
5. We did better in the 1990’s than we did in the ’80s.
6. We did better in the 1990s than we did in the ’80s.
If you said number six is right, congratulations. If you didn’t, don’t feel bad. This is one of those rules people seem to get wrong more than they get right. They get it wrong because they forget that apostrophes have two main purposes: (1) to show possession and (2) to create a contraction – that is, to show that something has been yanked out, as in the word “don’t” – the contraction of “do not.”
In the foregoing sentences, is 1990s either possessive or a contraction? No. So an apostrophe has no place in it. What about ’80s? Is it possessive? No again. But is it a contraction? Yes! The “19″ has been taken out, so we place an apostrophe where those numerals should have been – just so the reader doesn’t think we’re talking about the decade that began 80 years after the birth of Christ.
In short, don’t put an apostrophe before the “s” in 1990s because it’s neither possessive nor a contraction. But do use an apostrophe before the “8” in ’80s – not because it’s possessive, but because it’s a contraction.
One last quiz: Is the following sentence right or wrong?
• The 1960s’ fashions were even more bizarre than the ’70s’ styles.
The sentence is correct. But why? Because we’ve made 1960s’ and ’70s’ possessive – both of them.
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The confusion comes, I believe, because English writing permits using numbers either in numerical form or spelled-out, and in our quest for speed and conciseness, we wind up using parts of both forms together.
My advice in many of these situations is to think about the year as if it were spelled-out rather than written numerically. The writer then can see whether there’s need for an apostrophe or not.
In other words, if one were to write “We did better in the Nineteen-Nineties than in the ‘Eighties,” one could readily see there would be no need for an apostrophe after “Nineties” because the word is simply the plural of “Ninety” and needs no such punctuation. However, the apostrophe would precede “Eighties” because it signifies the absence of the word “Nineteen” before “Eighties.”
This “checking method” may not work all the time, but it works often enough.