On October 27, 2007 I wrote a post about how Martha’s Vineyard supposedly got her name… it was cleverly titled “Naming Martha.”
Since that post there has been a story published in the Vineyard Gazette about how Martha got its apostrophe. Not earth shattering news perhaps but still interesting due to the fact that it is protected by federal decree and that only four places in the United States have been granted a legal apostrophe.
Reached at his home this week, Arthur Railton, former editor of the Dukes County Intelligencer, mused on the use of the apostrophe and its placement in the Island name. “An apostrophe suggests ownership, and Martha never owned a vineyard of course, so I don’t know how it got there,” he said. “I’m glad it’s there,” he continued. “Without an apostrophe, it seems like a different name. With the apostrophe, it makes it sound as though it is Martha’s vineyard, but without the apostrophe, I don’t know what it would be.”
If your interest is piqued then read the entire article here.
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April 13, 2008 at 10:17 am
carolyn
That is so interesting, protected by Federal Decree certainly should mean that the name will not change in anyway in the future unlike some places.
April 13, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Alex Kisselgof
I would like to provide clarification about the “glitch” you mention, because the information reported by Miss Rappaport was quite erroneous, much to my chagrin. Not to mention it’s a laughable example of some lay people’s inability to comprehend technical jargon. To wit: Google is not a “web browser”; our “makeover” was not for the “home page”, but an entire site-wide redesign to accommodate online publishing of all our articles (instead of just the front page stories); and who knows what she was trying to say with “technology coding”? The most important mistake was that Google “does not read” our new apostrophe. This is totally false, and I be campaigning for a correction and retraction first thing Monday morning.
There is no actual glitch between the Gazette and Google, but you do have to know a little about how computers work to understand the “problem” as it is perceived by reporters. Google crawls and indexes our pages just fine; just try searching Google News for any recent topic and we will show up. Some newspaper web sites use the apostrophe found on the keyboard, while others like ours uses the more aesthetically preferred typesetter’s apostrophe. But computers have know way knowing which characters (alphabet letters) are more important than others (punctuation marks). You wouldn’t expect to get good search results for “Narthas Bineyard” - because of this to-the-letter specificity, Google distinguishes “Martha’s Vineyard” and “Martha’s Vineyard” as two separate search phrases. So if you search for one or the other, you are only getting a subset of the entire possible results you’d actually want. That’s why an experienced searcher will type “Martha Vineyard” - by omitting the variable portion of the phrase, you ensure receiving all its possible permutations. Google tries to make up for this snafu by suggesting correct spellings for phrases it recognizes as often spelled differently (try Googling “marthas vineyard” to see what I mean), but this feature is nonexistent when it comes to Google’s automated news alert service, which reporters use for leads.
Our website used to published manually, and mostly only the front page stories, which meant someone would manually change all the characters unique to printing in an article to their easy-to-type equivalent - it’s easier to type ‘ than ’ , which is the HTML “entity reference” for the apostrophe. But now that we publish our entire paper online, we used a more complex yet automated method of publishing our web site, which transcodes all complex print punctuation to the standard and appropriate entity references.
So everything works as it should, except that reporters soon noticed that their Google alerts for “Martha’s Vineyard” were no longer returning articles from our own paper. Which is at it should be - their search term is spelled differently than how it appears in current articles. I told them they were actually missing out on half of the alerts they should be getting, and told them to change their search phrase to “Martha Vineyard”. Then, they would get not only our articles, but the articles from the other 50% of websites they were missing out on (such as the New York Times and Boston Herald, which also use the typesetter’s apostrophe).
In the end, practically any Google search for Martha’s Vineyard will work regardless of how you spell it. This is because I have made sure that the phrase “Martha’s Vineyard” with the plain apostrophe occurs on all our pages, along with the occasional “Martha’s Vineyard” that actually makes an appearance in an article (it’s rarer than you might think!). And since an appropriate search result for one of our articles would include the topic of the article, there is no problem as far as Google or our site is concerned - if we wrote about it, if you search for it, you’ll get it!
Example: if you’re looking for an article about the Flying Horses Carousel, you’d type that, and maybe “Martha’s Vineyard” as well. Certainly not just “Martha’s Vineyard”. If you type “marthas vineyard” into Google, the top results are for the Chamber of Commerce, MVOL.com and marthas-vineyard.com (similar sites), the Island’s Wikipedia article, and then us. So we show up, but Google (correctly) considers those sites as better results for your search. But if you type “marthas vineyard newspaper”, the Vineyard Gazette is at the top of the list, where it belongs.
The final proof that there is no actual problem? This blog was brought to my attention because my search phrase is “Martha Vineyard”.
April 13, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Alex Kisselgof
Oh, look at that, WordPress.com actually changes all instances of the plain apostrophe to the typesetter’s! So all the places above where I typed the plain ol’ vertical one, it was replaced! Which will make things a little confusing I’m sure; just remember anywhere I typed “Martha’s Vineyard” and “Martha’s Vineyard”, the apostrophes used were different.
No doubt someone at WordPress made this stylistic decision at some point. As Wikipedia’s article about the apostrophe points out, a good read for the truly piqued, the typesetter’s is the preferred one.
April 13, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Alex Kisselgof
haha, wordpress also replaced my entity reference! Which should have read & r s q u o ; (without the spaces). Furthermore, wordpress took the regular apostrophe I typed before the word “than” and converted it to a single-left quote, and my entity reference to a single-right quote! We must forgive wordpress and its programmers, who never programmed it for such a scenario. But this illustrates the ubiquity and complexity of all the efforts out there trying to reconcile the print with the web.
April 16, 2008 at 9:47 am
Samantha
Well, I have taken quite a close look on your website and I must say that I find it extraordinarily interesting. You can be sure that I will come back pretty soon.