There’s a Piaget or Rolex on your wrist. A Mercedes is parked in your driveway. You’ve never heard of grunge and you actually believe that the pursuit of money is a worthwhile way to spend your life. Quick: What year is it?
If you said 1986 you are correct. If you said present day, you’re correct only if you’re living in The O.C.—Orange County, California, of bad TV fame.
My grammar column and hence my pretending to know something about grammar both originated in a little section of the Los Angeles Times that covers just Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, California. Newport Beach is the subject of The O.C.; Costa Mesa is the city next door that’s less glamorous, more diverse, and thus completely ignored. My column came into being shortly before the Fox show launched Newport Beach into a dubious brand of fame as a place where ’80s self-indulgence lives on oblivious to time, global realities, and the dot-com crash.
Had my column appeared in the New York Times instead of a section of the Los Angeles Times, one of the most notable differences—besides the fact that I wouldn’t have this fabulous Marissa-like tan—would be that I would write “the 80’s” instead of “the ’80s.”
Why? Because, as you’ve seen by now, language rule-makers are conspiring to drive the rest of us nuts. In this case the culprit is the New York Times, which bizarrely insists on defying conventional wisdom on this matter. Pretty much every other major newspaper in the country is perfectly happy using an apostrophe to replace the “19” or “18” in a year, such as shortening “the 1980s” to “the ’80s.” What’s more, most other outlets agree that there should be no apostrophe before the “s.” “The 1980s.”
As we saw in chapter 9, the Gray Lady begs to differ. In her realm, even language meanie William Safire’s name appears above such bizarrely punctuated phrases as, “Disraeli seems to have said it in the 1830’s.” The New York Times does this despite the Associated Press’s clear instruction to add only the “s” without the apostrophe: “Flappers did their flapping in the 1920s.” This is the general rule for any number made plural, as AP illustrates: “The airline has two 727s. Temperatures will be in the low 20s. There were five size 7s.” No apostrophes in any of those cases.
So the New York Times does a complete flip-flop on other major papers’ practice of putting an apostrophe before the decade but not after: 80’s instead of the more accepted ’80s. But the paper hasn’t cornered the market on apostrophe insanity. Far from it. In a January 18, 2005, front-page story, the Los Angeles Times wrote about a student “who earns A’s and Bs in community college.”
This was not an accident; it was as deliberate and methodical as any jauntily tied sweater around the shoulders of an Izod shirt—a popular look in the ’80s. The Los Angeles Times editors were trying to follow the general logic that says the apostrophe is mainly for possessives and omissions—that the only other time you should use it is when to omit the apostrophe would create confusion or especially when it would spell another word—“a” plus “s” equals “as”; “b” plus “s” gives us a much better hint as to what’s going on here, but it doesn’t technically spell a word. Hence the Los Angeles Times’s using an apostrophe for “A’s” but none for “Bs.”
Once again this is a case of a newspaper thumbing its nose at the idea it should follow anyone’s rules but its own: The Associated Press Stylebook says to use apostrophes when naming single letters: “Mind your p’s and q’s.” “He learned his three R’s and brought home a report card with four A’s and two B’s.” “The Oakland A’s won the pennant.”
Of course, even AP can’t resist jerking us around a little in its very next entry, which deals with multiple letters. Suddenly, their yes-apostrophe rule becomes a no-apostrophe rule, with no explanation for the switch. “She knows her ABCs.” “I gave him five IOUs.” “Four VIPs were there.”
It’s enough to make even those MBAs who got A’s want to plow their BMWs into some language VIPs.
Not yet infuriated to the max? Then consider this: Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which has a whole chapter on the apostrophe and whose author has ties to something called the Apostrophe Protection Society (which in turn has ties to radical groups the Comma Crusaders, the Hyphen Hezbollah, and the North American Maniacal Bracket Lovers’ Association), says the apostrophe should be used to make the plurals of words you’re referring to as words. For example, author Truss notes, it should be: “Are there too many but’s and and’s at the beginnings of sentences these days?” The AP—surprise, surprise—gives contradictory advice to skip the apostrophe: “His speech had too many ‘ifs,’ ‘ands’ and ‘buts.’ ” Just for fun, the AP people mention that their rule is an exception to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which is AP’s own fallback reference.
And as we saw in chapter 9, no matter whether you write “do’s and don’t’s,” “do’s and don’ts,” or “dos and don’ts,” two out of three language authorities will tell you you’re wrong.
At this point, those of you who tuned in for some insight into the O.C. have endured more than enough abuse. And because I still owe you a little something SoCal, here at last is the inside scoop on the real O.C., abridged version: Never trust TV. Here’s my expanded explanation: You know how on the TV show the people are always beautiful and well dressed and disproportionately members of just one race? Well, of course that’s not accurate. Real-life Newporters are just as beautiful and homogenous, but many of them don’t dress to flaunt the bucks—conspicuous consumption is so nouveau riche. Besides, it could get you mugged if you venture east of South Coast Plaza.
Oh, and one more thing about The O.C.—much of that gorgeous scenery is shot not in the gated Newport Beach community of Newport Coast where the TV families supposedly live, but in stunning locales in Los Angeles County’s South Bay area. Thus, the O.C. you see is no more real than rules on apostrophes.