There is no one named 70

Apostrophes can denote omissions... but only when placed correctly.

Missing characters are not just for detective novels. That’s because characters aren’t always people. Sometimes they’re the letters and numbers that we use when writing or speaking. And every time we shorten words in order to help a conversation flow, these types of characters can easily go missing. Which is just fine, as long as we use apostrophes to notate their disappearance, so as to avoid creating unnecessary mystery.

Apostrophes, those little squiggly flying things, are already famous for performing two main tricks: turning one a word into a possessive pronoun by implying that someone owns something (“Ingrid’s book”), or turning two words into a contraction by squishing those two words together (“It’s going to rain”). Apostrophes accomplish these things by hanging out toward the end of a word.

But apostrophes have a third trick up their sleeve: signaling character omission. When they do this, they usually hang out at the beginning of a word or number, helping us to say or write words like ‘til, which means “until”. The apostrophe here is signaling that there are some letters — namely the “u” and the “n” — left out of the word. If you forget to use the apostrophe in this example, then you’re just spelling the word “till” (as in “till the soil”) wrong.

A numerical example of this rule can be found way back in the ‘70s, which we should all recognize as a shortened version of the “1970s”. The apostrophe lets us know that the “19” part has been omitted, but is still implied.

So when I see “70’s” with the apostrophe incorrectly loitering around at the end of the numbers instead of before them, I want to scream.

That’s because the apostrophe at the end changes this number’s meaning into a possessive pronoun. And this is why it’s always ludicrously wrong to stick an apostrophe at the end of a year date. We all know that there is no one named 70 whose things we are discussing. We mean that the subject matter took place in the 1970s.

So all you apostrophe lovers out there, keep this in mind when sprinkling those things into your writing, because sometimes they are supposed to be in front of a word or number, rather than toward the end. At least that’s where they usually go when making confessions about missing characters. And speaking of characters, always remember: There is no one named 70!