Ambiguous Contractions
Define the following word: “he’s”.
It’s ambiguous. Most of the time it means “he is,” but sometimes it means “he has.” Twice today I’ve seen the latter in political columns. One was by Mark Steyn, one of our best conservative columnists right now. I hesitate to criticize such an excellent writer, but on this one point I must: An ambiguous contraction burdens the reader.
Recall that the point of writing is to benefit the reader. Not too long ago, contractions were considered too casual for formal writing. Today the popular style favors it on the theory that a contraction more closely imitates speech, and it presents the reader with fewer letters and denser prose.
But that’s only true if the contraction is unambiguous, like “can’t” or “we’ll”. At least two contraction endings present the reader with ambiguity: An apostrophe-ess, as in “he’s”, could mean “is” or “has”:
Q: He’s going?
A: He’s already gone.
An apostrophe-dee presents a similar problem, as in “he’d”, which can be “had” or “would”:
1: He’d have left years ago, if he could’ve.
2: He’d been writing for an hour when he heard a knock at the door.
The fact that these words are ambiguous doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t use them. The un-contracted form may sound too unnatural in some situations. You have to balance compactness and fidelity to speech against the possibility of stopping the reader’s eye and losing the flow.
My personal rule is to generally avoid these ambiguous contractions. But if I feel folksy, then I’ll only use the contraction for the more common meaning, and write out the other. So, “he’s” always means “he is”, and “he has” is never contracted. Similarly, “he’d” is always “he had”, never “he would”. It’s a small thing, but good writing consists of many such small things.
PS: I apologize if the periods and commas outside the quotation marks offend your inner grammar teacher. Call me a rebel if you like, but I have reasons for it. More on that later.