(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".
Metaphor
Definition:
(n.) The transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea.
Example Sentences:
(1) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
(2) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
(3) As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective.
(4) The spotlight metaphor seems inappropriate for visual attention in a dynamic environment.
(5) In a second experiment schizophrenics were significantly different from the depressives in showing less inclination to select a metaphorical meaning to an ambiguous adjective in a sentence.
(6) Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others).
(7) It postulates the need of all sciences to operate with symbols of various levels of abstractions, including, in a very prominent way, metaphors.
(8) This summer, if all goes to plan, the metaphor will be vividly recast: the Globe's stage will itself become a world.
(9) According to the old metaphor of classical cybernetics the brain can be considered as a computer.
(10) And Crash is an extreme metaphor of the dangers that I see lying ahead of us.
(11) The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found.
(12) So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all.
(13) My friend had already climbed the same metaphorical mountain that I had just reached the summit of, and when she had reached the top she sat down and wept, much to the surprise of all her British friends.
(14) The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain.
(15) The Oedipus myth has been a central metaphor in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the psychoanalytic theory of development.
(16) Second, it refers to a metaphor representing the subjective experience of these patients who are unable to find a permanent identity but feel themselves sitting on the fence between a variety of different identities in a borderline position.
(17) The Tories, ever wedded to metaphors about killing foreigners, have called this the "Dambuster" moment.
(18) As critics of Mr Berlusconi have been barred from the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italia, Mr Fo protests that artists are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the RAI for the same reasons that leftwing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s when Mr Fo wrote his work Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
(19) But that's not a metaphor: the universality of computation follows from the known laws of physics.
(20) Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.