By Joe O'Donnell
Apparently I am losing my apostrophe. Strange word anyway, difficult to spell, and it hardly rolls off the tongue. Still it was mine for a long time, and my ancestors’ for even longer.

I have the apostrophe because back in the mists of Irish history the initial letter O was placed in front of a name to denote ancestry, literally the letter meant grandson. So I am O Donnell, meaning grandson of that scoundrel Donnell or something like that. I believe the English put all the letters together and threw in the apostrophe because they liked things buttoned up and neat and because they thought the Irish were a bit sloppy overall—but that is another story.

The Irish Times (which I can now read for free on the Internet, though a few years ago I would have had to pay hundreds of dollars a year to have the paper flown across the sea to me) offers the following history lesson: “Ireland was one of the first European countries in which a system of fixed hereditary surnames developed. The earliest names appear to be those incorporating “Ó” or its earlier form Ua, meaning “grandson”. According to Fr. Woulfe, an early authority on Irish surnames, the first recorded fixed surname is O’Clery (Ó Cleirigh), as noted by the Annals, which record the death of Tigherneach Ua Cleirigh, lord of Aidhne in Co. Galway in the year 916. It seems likely that this is the oldest surname recorded anywhere in Europe.”

Sorry about that tradition stretching back to 916 stuff. Sadly the same technology that allows me to read the Irish Times for free does not really like the apostrophe all that much. So in the world of online airline reservations, hotel bookings on Expedia, and paying that pesky little mortgage over the Internet instead of with a stamp, I am ODonnell.

Soon I may be Odonnell.

The apostrophe is an unrecognized digit. To quote the great novelist Kurt Vonnegut (hard to spell but no apostrophe): So it goes.