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Suddenly in 1951 it became Earl’s Court (but still Barons Court) on the Underground map (with a change to St James’s Park and King’s Cross), and that is the way it has stayed. The station at Barons Court was opened in 1905 and still has Barons Court and District Railway on the ceramic front in original lettering. The station gave the name to the area.
The Oxford English Dictionary has firm words on the apostrophe, noting that the word itself ‘ought to be of three syllables in English as in French, but has been ignorantly confused with apostrophe [the figure of speech]’. As an indicator of the possessive, ‘it originally marked merely the omission of e in writing, as in fox’s, James’s, and was equally common in the nominative plural, especially of proper names and foreign words (as folio’s for folioes)’. No longer.
Certainly more difficult to use than the apostrophe are the full stop, the hyphen and the comma.
Dot Wordsworth
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