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The apostrophe ( ’ although often rendered as ‘ ) is a punctuation mark,
Leading Udolpho Wolfe’s Schnapps authority Tom Doligale has put together a truly amazing image gallery on the Bottle Collectors facebook page of the many and various apostrophes for Udolpho Wolfes. Tom has cornered the market and truly has an outstanding collection.
The apostrophe and comma certainly poised challenges for early mold makers. Great job Tom with this wonderful look at glass typography. FYI, Tom has many more examples as this is just a taste.
The Apostrophe
The apostrophe ( ’ although often rendered as ‘ ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets. In English, it serves three purposes:
1) The marking of the omission of one or more letters (as in the contraction of do not to don’t).
2) The marking of possessive case (as in the cat’s whiskers).
3) The marking as plural of written items that are not words established in English orthography (as in P’s and Q’s, the late 1950’s). (This is considered incorrect by some; see Use in forming certain plurals. The use of the apostrophe to form plurals of proper words, as in apple’s, banana’s, etc., is universally considered incorrect.)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), ‘apostrophe’ comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος [προσῳδία] (hē apóstrophos [prosōidía], “[the accent of] ‘turning away’, or elision”), through Latin and French. The apostrophe usually looks the same as a closing single quotation mark, although they have different meanings. The apostrophe also looks similar to the prime symbol ( ′ ), which is used to indicate measurement in feet or arcminutes, as well as for various mathematical purposes, and the ʻokina ( ʻ ), which represents a glottal stop in Polynesian languages.
Good Lord. No wonder the English language is so tough. As a board member of the FOHBC, I have the luxury of having super proof-reader Bill Baab looking at my President’s Message and Bottles and Extras articles. I have to smile as Bill usually adds a hundred or so punctuation marks, usually comma’s and apostrophe’s to each article. One of these days I might get it!
One of the classic mis-uses of the apostrophe mark can be seen when viewing the variant 1 Cassin’s from the variant 2 Cassin,s – Warren Friedrich
Read more: Tom Doligale and his Uldolpho Wolfe’s Aromatic Schnapps
The prismatic apostrophe
The minimalist apostrophe and squished in ‘s’
The equidistant apostrophe
Big boy hook apostrophe
King Kong apostrophe
Rising balloon apostrophe
The submerged apostrophe
The Hurricane apostrophe
Elephant Head apostrophe
Blob of Glass apostrophe
The Comma apostrophe
Trigger apostrophe
Back-swirl apostrophe
Match the serif apostrophe
Crescent Moon apostrophe
The Dimple apostrophe
Bent Slug apostrophe
The Part of the ‘S’ apostrophe
Tadpole apostrophe
One of the classic mis-uses of the apostrophe mark can be seen when viewing the variant 1 Cassin’s from the variant 2 Cassin,s
What a fun grouping to see! Thanks Tom. One of my favorite manglings of the apostrophe mark is on the Kimball’s Jaundice Bitters, where the mold maker used a round dot as the apostrophe in the word Kimball’s. Of course, that was the least of his problems since he followed his dot-apostrophe with a backwards “s”. That’s another category of bottles I love: ones with backwards, sideways and upsidedown letters.