This all works fine unless you have a word or term that begins with an apostrophe, like ’til or ’em (as in "Bring ’em on"). Since the keystroke for an apostrophe is the same as the one for a single quote mark, the software improperly interprets the space and the keystroke as the start of a quotation and imparts the wrong curvature to the mark. There's a way to override the smart quotes and impose a proper apostrophe in these situations (on a Mac, you type option-shift-close-bracket), but an increasing number of writers, editors, and designers either aren't bothering to do so, don't feel it's necessary, or don't even realize it's necessary. The result is a cascade of improperly oriented apostrophes on signs, on billboards, in TV commercials, in the names of businesses, and even on mainstream media web sites. Call it the apostrophe catastrophe.

Jonathan Hoefler, a leading typographer and type historian, thinks the apostrophe catastrophe could soon lead to some new typographic protocols. "We may be heading for a situation where we go away from smart quotes and go back to the straight or neuter quote mark, which would also serve as a straight apostrophe," he says. "That would entail a loss of subtlety that typographers would mourn, but it would also resolve the issue."

That's one possible solution. A more radical idea is simply to eliminate the apostrophe, an approach advocated rather entertainingly (and not altogether unconvincingly) by this web site.





But there's another possible outcome, one that may already be taking place under our noses: Thanks to a combination of inertia and indifference, the backwards apostrophe may become the new de facto standard. An informal poll of acquaintances reveals that many people believe the backwards mark is actually correct, and some of them are even creating apostrophe catastrophes in non-digital settings. "It could end up being the typographic version of 'ex-presso' or 'I could care less,' where the wrong version becomes at least as accepted, or even more so, than the correct version," says Hoefler, the typographer.