Miscellany № 104: new year, new miscellany

Hello, and welcome to 2025. Is it that time already? The possessive apostrophe (or rather, the abuse of the possessive apostrophe) is a recurrent guest star here at Shady Characters , but usually in the English language. Recently, though, the Guardian reported that unneeded apostrophes are infecting German, too. The so-called Deppenapostroph , or “idiot’s apostrophe”, appears when a…