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Note the dates on the sweatshirt... I was told by a fellow Husky fan that this construction was common and though probably not strictly correct, is "accepted". I say NO! It is not common, it is not accepted, and is flat out illogical and incorrect. Has anyone encountered this before? Do I have any crow to eat?
![[?IMG]](http://cdn3.volusion.com/xfksz.qrgwe/v/vspfiles/photos/55692.064-2T.jpg?1428386568)
PSCONN said
Note the dates on the sweatshirt... I was told by a fellow Husky fan that this construction was common and though probably not strictly correct, is "accepted". I say NO! It is not common, it is not accepted, and is flat out illogical and incorrect. Has anyone encountered this before? Do I have any crow to eat?
It is not uncommon to use typographical "sorts" to separate items in a list in advertising, posters, billboards, and other "non-prose, non-potry" applications. If there years were shown as 01 (space) star (space) 02 (space) star (space) 03, it would look normal and accepted to you. The tilde is commonly used instead of stars. and the octothorpe (crosshatch) are also common and accepted.
The problem here is that the asterisk is superscripted, and there's no space between it and the preceding item. Instead of your eye interpreting it as separator, you're interpreting it as see footnote. And when one is talking about the record books, of course, an asterisk means, yah, yah, technically it's a record, but there's a loophole, and this isn't the same as the other records here.
I'd call the shirt's designer typographically illiterate.
Here's a magnified view of the original image:
Looks to me like Ron nailed it. That's clearly an apostrophe following each year, and the separators are common bullets, not asterisks.
The bullets as separators work fine. I see that a lot. But the apostrophes are definitely in the wrong place. Used as part of a date, they should always precede the numerals. For example: '95 with the apostrophe (in its role as a designator of omitted characters) standing for the "19" in "1995".
There's a little ambiguity, of course, since we recently rolled over a century. But it's pretty clear that for the other years the apostrophe represents "20".
And yes, I know the final period is normally included before the quotation mark, but this is one of those scenarios where clarity trumps punctuation.
Now if I could only figure out how to replace the curved apostrophe in '95 with a straight one. In HTML "'" (followed by a semicolon) is supposed to insert a single straight quote mark. But if I include the semicolon in the preceding sentence, the HTML code disappears and is replaced by the expected single quote, which obliterates the code I'm trying to communicate. And though it appears as a straight quote in the editor, it gets "curled" in the actual post. Must be the forum software doing its thing. Note what it did to the double quote following "39" in the first sentence of this paragraph. Very weird.
I'm with Heimhenge on the two-digit year with apostrophe. It is very common indeed for there to be a two-digit year with LEADING apostrophe to represent the omitted millennium and century. My schools use this notation all of the time, especially with or to stand in for the phrase "Class of '03." Any reference to an alumnus would find the name followed by their class year.
Here is an example from Princeton University Class notation with apostrophe. In this case the comment also has a class notation with an asterisk followed by the year. This means that they received a degree from the Graduate School in that year, as opposed to the undergraduate college.
Some people use a trailing apostrophe when discussing a decade and requiring the plural: the 70's fashions; in his 50's.
In your case, I would take it that the TRAILING apostrophe is simply a mistake, and they should have put them as leading apostrophes.
Martha Barnette
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