wtf mullenweg, you’re a and the founder of #wordpress for chrissakes
Interesting. I couldn’t find the claim in the video’s sources, though. He also says that only for quotation marks and not for the apostrophe.
I think technically I made a mistake there, re-watching it, while the left “single quote” character is an inverted comma, the matching right “single quote” is just an apostrophe, but the apostrophe itself isn’t an inverted comma, it’s its own character. I got confused between the left and right single quote.
Ultimately though, the thing with English is that it’s a complete dumpster fire of a language, and literally every rule has nearly as many exceptions as it does cases where it applies. The language didn’t evolve so much as it metastasized in fits and starts. Nearly every feature of the language from its words, to spelling, to grammar was either awkwardly bolted on from some other language, or it was just invented from whole cloth by some random printer or author (often with highly dubious logic driving it). This is just the latest iteration of that process with people inventing distinctions between characters that didn’t really exist in the past. Single quote is already a bit of an aberration, eventually it will likely just die out in actual usage and we’ll be left with this abortive calcified single quote character in the UTF character set to mark where it used to be.
Also on the whole “the king his book” thing, I think the video kind of agrees with you but in an awkward sort of way. He points out that the belief that it’s an abbreviation for “his” was incorrect, but where it gets confusing is that it’s implied that that incorrect belief is why the apostrophe is used as a possessive, rather than as a marker for the elision of the “e” in “es”. The overall impression is that grammatically it would be correct to just leave the apostrophe off and just add s to show possession. The reason I think he brought up the debunked “his” theory was to highlight where that leads to incorrect over correction by some writers where they replace the possessive with an expanded incorrect “his” version.
