Not Getting It Wrong

The eagle-eyed reader may have spotted the lack of the apostrophe in my reference yesterday to St Elizabeths Hospital and understandably thought, the old chap posting this has powerfully blundered in omitting the possessive apostrophe where it is obviously necessary. Trust me when I tell you that it hurt to type the name in the way I did, but Congress is, or rather was, to blame. In officially re-naming the hospital in 1916 from the Government Hospital for the Insane they inexplicably left out the apostrophe, as a very interesting Wikipedia article on the place makes clear.

Actually I was following Moody's punctuation when I wrote the name thus, assuming that a top-level academic of his ilk would have known what he was doing. Indeed, I wondered if there might be some 'explicable' reason for the omission of which I was unaware when I did so. Now I'm wondering how all the linguistic pedants in the US who had dealings with the hospital managed to put up with it. After all, I am a bit of linguistic anarchist at the deep bottom of things and my linguistic fascism is a pretty shallow phenomenon, these days being something in the way of a pose necessary to keep the day-job going, and even I was irritated.

Yes, leaving it out hurt a bit, and I've got to confess that when I realise I've made an error with the use of the apostrophe in this Far Place I do spit blood to some small degree and I'll go and make the correction.