Thread: Two apostrophes after a word

I've read “The War of the Worlds” by Wells and currently am reading “1984” by Orwell. While reading I often met with constructions like:

must be within range of the Martians'' HeatRay now

The Parsons'' flat was bigger than Winston's

Mrs Parsons'' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children

I put my attention that after plural posessive forms of nouns (Parsons'', Martians'') two apostrophes stand. I used to think that there must be only one apostrophe. Is it right and why is it so?

Originally Posted by Tu-160

The Parsons'' flat was bigger than Winston's

Must be an error. Quotation marks come in pairs and can be single or double [single: '.....', double "...."]. I prefer to limit use of double marks to mark off direct speech, but both are often used: it would be best to stick to one convention throughout a piece.

The apostrophe has a number of uses. In the case you mention, to indicate the possessive or genitive case:
The horse's mouth (singular)
The horses' mouth (plural)

In your example: -
if it's the Parson family then: 'The Parson's flat was...'
if it's the Parsons family then: 'The Parsons' flat was...'
I've never seen double quotes used to mark possession. Looks to me like the end of direct speech without a beginning, and without direct speech
Good examples of the misuse of this punctuation can be found in, 'Eats Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss - if you can't get a copy I'll send you one.

You aren't reading some OCR'ed text by chance?

Exactly. But they are of very good quality (no spelling mistakes and accurate formatting) so I wasnot sure. I thought it was kind of obsolete punctuation.

Then it is to be expected. The actual character for the apostrophe is the "inverted single quote", and that's always hard for OCR.

Originally Posted by Tu-160

Exactly. But they are of very good quality (no spelling mistakes and accurate formatting) so I wasnot sure. I thought it was kind of obsolete punctuation.

My gues is that wasnot is a small typing mistake. But it is an interesting example of English: -

I was not sure.
I wasn't sure.

You cannot be serious.
You can't be serious, and for emphasis, in the style of John MacEnroe:
You can not be serious.

But you cannot use 'wasnot'.