Dinner Table Lilacs

I’ve always been a bit smug about apostrophes.  They came right after capitals and periods during all the years I taught primary grades.  The rules for using apostrophes are so simple that even second graders could master them.  So, I was absolutely flabbergasted to find that it was an apostrophe that caused my most recent cyberspace problems.

Day before yesterday I blogged about my friend Stephanie’s always-welcoming kitchen table and I had a gorgeous photograph of Saturday’s centerpiece of lilacs that I wanted to use to illustrate my blog.  No matter what I did, I could NOT get that photograph to load onto the wordpress blog site.

I turned the problem over to Keleigh Schwartz and beachdog.com.  They worked on it diligently and late yesterday came up with the answer.  I had named my jpg photograph “At Stephanie’s Table” and it was the apostrophe in the title that was fouling me up.  As instructed by my web gurus, I removed and renamed and… voilà!  I was able to add the photograph to my blog.

Today I’m going to use that very same photograph, now called “Dinner Table Lilacs,” so readers can see it without going back to the previous post.  And speaking of ‘previous,’ I did actually blog about the use of apostrophes on May 24^th last year in a rant I titled “Apostrophes are Simple.  Really.”  In it I explained and illustrated these three rules:

Rule #1.  Do not use an apostrophe if you want to make a word plural.  Not ever.
Rule #2.  Do use an apostrophe when you write a contraction.
Rule #3.  Do use an apostrophe when you want to show possession.

Now, of course, there is Rule #4:  Do not use an apostrophe in the name of a photo.  At least, not if you are using whatever combination of tricky software programs that I am apparently hooked up with.  Who knew?