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Apostrophe's are wonderful things, are they not? One of the most widely used and misunderstood of all punctuation marks, they torment students, antagonise readers and leave the pedants among us tearing out whatever hair remains upon our addled heads. (I attribute my current hirsuteness to a mastery of apostrophes since childhood.)

From the Greek meaning “turning away,” the apostrophe as a punctuation mark is meant to denote elision — that is, something has been left out. The apostrophe in “that’s” indicates that a space and the letter I have been turned away from “that is”. However few of us know all of these rules — NSW the

Geographical Naming Board has banned apostrophes altogether because so few people know how to use them correctly (which of course leads to errors such as “Kings Cross”).

I’m telling you all of this because I want you to keep an eye out for a travesty. Shortly, if you haven’t already, you will be receiving from Seagate promotional material for the FreeAgent range of storage devices. The slogan used to advertise the devices is “Your On.”

Really. Just like that. Printed in big letters on posters and brochures and everything.

“Your” is of course a second-person possessive pronoun which, when preceding a noun, indicates the interlocutor’s ownership of said noun — “Your Dog” and
such like. Which is to say, if “On” were a noun, “Your On” would indicate that you own an “On”.

Problem: “On” is not a noun. It indicates no object in the world. It is impossible to own an “On”.

“Your” of course has a homonym in the form of “You’re” — a contraction of “You are” with the space and the letter a apostrophised. “You’re On” makes perfect sense. It means You are On, whatever that happens to mean in the context of an external hard drive (OK, “data mover”).

Whichever way you look at it — “Your” not meaning “You are” or “On” failing in its ambition to be a noun — “Your On” makes no sense whatsoever.

Because I am a bad person, I pointed this out to some Seagate people at the launch. One of them told me “it makes sense in the context of the product,” which is fabulous marketing-speak for, well, nothing very much. Another retorted that Apple had an ungrammatical slogan in “Think Different”. Well, for one thing just because I’m a notorious Mac user doesn’t make me answerable for Apple’s marketing. For another, “Think Different” was perfectly grammatical (like “Think Big”).

So there.

I worry that “Your On” will have catastrophic (or perhaps apostrophic) results for Seagate — “if they can’t even get punctuation and basic grammar right, how can I trust them with my data?” and similar laments are to be expected.

Then again, the grammatical ambiguity of “Think Different” didn’t exactly hurt Apple, did it? And if Seagate’s slogan had been “You’re On,” it probably wouldn’t have rated a column, would it?

Matthew JC. Powell likes showing off his classical education. Conjugate on mjcp@optusnet.com.au

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