“Tortured Poets”: The Saxon genitive in Taylor Swift

2024-02-10 12:18:29

Kultur “Tortured Poets”

The Saxon genitive in Taylor Swift

As of: 1:18 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes

There’s the deeper meaning: Taylor Swift

What: REUTERS

Is an apostrophe missing? The title of Taylor Swift’s new album poses a grammatical puzzle. An English teacher ruined the fun of music for his students. What does this all have to do with East German snack bars and Frank Zappa?

In German, superfluous apostrophes are considered errors; in English, missing apostrophes are seen as annoying.

In this country, apostrophes in genitive constructions such as “Jaqueline’s Nähstübchen” (only real without c) are viewed as a negative distinguishing feature and are derided as “East German snack bar apostrophes”, although they have been allowed since the spelling reform in 1996 and Thomas Mann and Georg Büchner (“Danton’s Death”) are still allowed wrote. Even worse and undeniably wrong is the apostrophe in plural forms such as “Info’s”. One would rather not think about constructions like “Ingo’s Info’s”.

In the USA, grammarians are now discussing the question of whether an apostrophe is missing from the title of Taylor Swift’s new album “The Tortured Poets Department”. And if so: where? Erin Weinberg, an English lecturer at the University of Manitoba, Canada, wrote on

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Weinberg plays through two apostrophe variants of the construction, which is called the “Saxon genitive” (because it comes from Old Anglo-Saxon), with different meanings. “The Totured Poet’s Department” would be a single poet’s torture department. “The Tortured Poets’ Department” a place where several poets work through their torment.

Without an apostrophe, the noun Poets is attributive, as if it were an adjective. Like in the movie “The Dead Poets Society”. The word Poets then describes what type of department it is. Weinberg compares this to the “cosmetics department” at Macy’s department store. This makes the album interesting for people who are interested in grammar and not Taylor Swift. Unfortunately, you can no longer ask what the grammarian Frank Zappa, who called an entire album “Apostrophe” in 1974, has to say about it.