“High Comma” — Here’s What It Really Means!

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English punctuation can be confusing.

There are so many rules, and plenty of these rules are so nuanced that they really boil down to your own personal judgment.

For instance, while the rules for some commas are clear cut, e.g. a comma should separate two independent clauses, other rules require figuring what is and isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence.

Take a look at the following two sentences.

Mark’s book “Becoming a Better Parent” changed my life.

In the above sentence, the name of the book is not sequestered with commas, which means that it is essential to the meaning of the sentence.

In other words, if I didn’t write the name of the book, you wouldn’t be sure which of Mark’s books I was talking about.

Mark’s book, “Becoming a Better Parent,” changed my life.

Conversely, there are commas separating the title of the book from the rest of the sentence, which means that it isn’t necessary to the overall meaning.

So, it would be fair to say that Mark has only written one book, the one I am talking about.

Now, aside from the many rules governing punctuation, you also have to deal with so many different marks that it can be difficult to keep them all in your head.

For example, have you heard of the high comma?

 

What is the high comma?

The “high comma” is another term for an apostrophe. It is used to indicate the possessive, to contract, and to stress particular syllables. It also comes in handy during the phonetic spelling of certain names.

 

Using the high comma

As mentioned, there are several instances where a high comma/ apostrophe will come in handy.

 

High Commas and The Possessive

The most famous use case is indicating the possessive.

When you want to show that something belongs to someone, you add an apostrophe and an s after the person who owns that thing.

To show that the book on the table belongs to Mike, we add an apostrophe and an “s” after his name. In this case, “Mike’s” becomes a determiner, letting us know which exact book we are talking about.

Same thing, adding a high comma followed by an “s” lets us know whose recital we are talking about.

Interestingly, when something belongs to a plurality of individuals, we can put the apostrophe outside of the “s.”

In the above example, the bus belongs to the plural noun “the boys.”

Now, instead of showing the possessive by writing it as “boys’s,” which would be really hard to pronounce, we opt for just placing the apostrophe outside of the “s.”

The cats’ litter needed to be changed.

However, if the plural noun doesn’t end with an “s,” then you indicate the possessive normally by adding an apostrophe followed by an “s.”

The women’s bathroom is down the hall and to the left.

And, if a singular noun ends in an “s,” you sort of have to add an apostrophe and an “s” still when indicating the possessive. It’s never pretty and can be difficult to pronounce, but them’s the breaks.

 

Using the High Comma: Contractions

Contractions are just shortcuts we use to make language more fluent and easier to use.

“It is a great pleasure to meet you” can be shortened to “it’s a great pleasure to meet you.”

Here, we joined the pronoun subject along with its verb and made one word out of both of them. So, “it is” got contracted to “it’s.”

Other contractions you should be aware of include the following.

“I am” becomes “I’m.”

“You are” becomes “you’re,” which curiously gets confused a lot with “your.”

“He is” becomes “he’s.”

“She is” becomes “she’s.”

“They are” becomes “they’re.”

“I have” becomes “I’ve.”

“You have” becomes “you’ve.”

“He has” becomes “he’s.”

“She has” becomes “she’s.”

“They have” becomes “they’ve.”

You might have noticed that the contraction for “he is” and “he has” is the same. They both give us “he’s.” So, how can you tell them apart?

Well, it all boils down to context.

Here, it is clear that the full sentence should be “he is the first one to arrive today.”

Conversely, the above sentence lets us know that “he has got a VIP pass.”

 

Using the High Comma for Emphasis

The final use case of the high comma/apostrophe is emphasizing syllables and indicating the phonetic spelling of certain names.

Marcel Iseli

Hey fellow Linguaholics! It’s me, Marcel. I am the proud owner of linguaholic.com. Languages have always been my passion and I have studied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Sinology at the University of Zurich. It is my utmost pleasure to share with all of you guys what I know about languages and linguistics in general.