  If the use of the apostrophe in contemporary English often marks the Saxon
genitive, it may also indicate the omission of one or more let-ters. Some
writers (wrongly?) use it to mark the plural in symbols or abbreviations,
visual-ised thanks to the isolation of the morpheme "s". This punctuation mark
was imported from the Continent in the 16th century. During the 19th century
its use was standardised. However the rules of its usage still seem problematic
to many, including literate speakers of English. "All too often, the apostrophe
is misplaced", or "errant apostrophes are springing up every-where" is a
complaint that Internet users fre-quently come across when visiting grammar
websites. Many of them detail its various uses and misuses, and attempt to
correct the most common mistakes about it, especially its mis-use in the
plural, called greengrocers' apostro-phes and humorously misspelled
"greengro-cers apostrophe's". While studying English travel accounts published
in the seventeenth century, we noticed that the different uses of this symbol
may accompany various models of metaplasms. We were able to highlight the
linguistic variations of some lexemes, and trace the origin of modern grammar
rules gov-erning its usage.
