(n.) A figure of speech by which the orator or writer suddenly breaks off from the previous method of his discourse, and addresses, in the second person, some person or thing, absent or present; as, Milton's apostrophe to Light at the beginning of the third book of "Paradise Lost."
(n.) The contraction of a word by the omission of a letter or letters, which omission is marked by the character ['] placed where the letter or letters would have been; as, call'd for called.
(n.) The mark ['] used to denote that a word is contracted (as in ne'er for never, can't for can not), and as a sign of the possessive, singular and plural; as, a boy's hat, boys' hats. In the latter use it originally marked the omission of the letter e.
Example Sentences:
(1) The Ukrainian security service said it had forbidden Seagal entry to the country for five years, in a letter published by the news site Apostrophe.
(2) What if she misuses an apostrophe in her next post?
(3) The apostrophe has been missing since time immemorial.
(4) Instinctively, I glance at my room, looking for long-gone stickers in the window, the one for Mix ’96 (“Bucks Best Music” – the lack of apostrophe still irritates), and an aquapark we once went to in Spain.
(5) The word did not exist until the early 1700s, when the “a” in “acute” was replaced by an apostrophe – ’cute – and then dropped altogether.
(6) "The theme tune by Ronnie Hazlehurst features a piccolo spelling out the title in Morse code, excluding the apostrophes.
(7) He campaigned mightily to preserve the correct usage of the apostrophe, and the good councillors of Clogthorpe would be lampooned regularly as they ponderously set about desecrating their Victorian town in the cause of modernity.
(8) But it is far more important to highlight the moments that make this job truly special, like seeing the imagination a year 10 boy will put into thinking up a false name when caught misbehaving, or the deliberate misuse of an apostrophe by a student who, in his own way, is showing you he gets it.
(9) • This article was amended on 21 June 2012 to remove a misplaced apostrophe in the standfirst.
(10) But Tussauds (which has now dropped the apostrophe) never quite enjoyed the credibility of a museum and tended to be sneered at by historians.
(11) Unfortunately named cafe chain Apostrophe also fell victim to the curse of the apostrophe in a marketing slogan, "Great taste on it's way".
(12) Long before Lynne Truss's, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Waterhouse founded The Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe: vile lapses of grammar in shops were among many regular targets.
(13) It could be something as small as a "Hope your OK" text, which will send me spiralling into apocalyptic visions of a life without apostrophes or question marks.
(14) As annoying as errant apostrophes and misplaced hyphens can be, they probably didn’t warrant their own website, nor were so offensive as to need incineration.
(15) Next comes the NHS, for confusing subject and object in a letter – "Your appointment has now been organised to attend Queen Mary's Hospital … " – and featuring a rogue apostrophe: "The RDC Suite's are clearly signposted".
Catastrophe
Definition:
(n.) An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things; a final event, usually of a calamitous or disastrous nature; hence, sudden calamity; great misfortune.
(n.) The final event in a romance or a dramatic piece; a denouement, as a death in a tragedy, or a marriage in a comedy.
(n.) A violent and widely extended change in the surface of the earth, as, an elevation or subsidence of some part of it, effected by internal causes.
Example Sentences:
(1) When it was grown, it would bring both ecstasy and catastrophe to women.
(2) The effects of brain injury can be catastrophic and long-term so the impact of more research would be vast, but affected numbers are too small so it loses out.
(3) After violence had run its bloody course, the country’s rulers conceded it had been a catastrophe that had brought nothing but “grave disorder, damage and retrogression”.
(4) Strict precautions are necessary to prevent the catastrophic events resulting from inadvertent gentamicin injection; such precautions should include precise labeling of all injectable solutions on the surgical field, waiting to draw up injectable antibiotics until the time they are needed, and drawing up injectable antibiotics under direct physician observation.
(5) In contrast, the 2009 report, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" , published by the New York Academy of Sciences, comes to a very different conclusion.
(6) As a result, low-lying areas, including Bangladesh, Florida, the Maldives and the Netherlands, will undergo catastrophic flooding, while in Britain large areas of the Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary could disappear.
(7) It is found that, in contrast to most metallic materials yet in keeping with many ceramics, there are no distinct fracture morphologies in pyro-carbons which are characteristic of a specific mode of loading; fracture surfaces appear to be identical for both catastrophic and subcritical crack growth under either sustained or cyclic loading.
(8) In the midst of this catastrophe, the troika is insisting on further austerity to achieve massive primary budget surpluses of 3% in 2015, 4.5% in 2016 and even more in future years.
(9) The first report, released last September in Stockholm , found humans were the "dominant cause" of climate change, and warned that much of the world's fossil fuel reserves would have to stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change.
(10) "We believe that such a path would be catastrophic for the UK, for Europe and for the protection of human rights around the world."
(11) A large number of flight accidents and catastrophes associated with the human factor, high nervous and psychic tension when being on duty, increasing trend towards a greater incidence of psychogenic diseases responsible for pilots to be grounded make it necessary to develop a system of primary psychoprophylaxis of the flying personnel and to help them with various social, psychohygienic and psychoprophylactic measures.
(12) This would sound gilded, except here is Klebold, revisiting every detail in a way that implies it might have been easier on her psychologically if there had been a catastrophe in the household, something pointing to why Dylan did what he did.
(13) Self-help groups can aid an individual in coping with and adapting to catastrophic illness.
(14) Catastrophes, though always regrettable, must be seen as experiments demanding careful analysis and exploitation.
(15) This set was called by the authors a syndrome reflecting an overpowering, but latent, unconscious sense of crisis, of a catastrophe ("Catastrophe-syndrome").
(16) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
(17) I argue that (a) the procedures they used to study confounding were suboptimal because multiple measures of depression and catastrophizing were not employed and (b) the distinctiveness of constructs might better be regarded as a continuous rather than all-or-none (having adequate discriminant validity versus being confounded) concept.
(18) Newborn infants with congenital homozygous protein C deficiency develop catastrophic thrombosis (purpura fulminans) and will not survive beyond the neonatal period without protein C replacement.
(19) But the humanitarian catastrophes in Syria have been overshadowed by stories about Islamic State .
(20) We do not anticipate major impact on psychiatric tasks from some form of catastrophic insurance.