MEDIA ABC Blog

Just in case you sometimes feel that we are surely the only people in the world who could possibly care about transcriptions from handwriting, there's this bit from today's scholarly editing list-serv--about Stephen Crane, the American writer, author of Red Badge of Courage among other things):


Subject: question about handwriting

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Stephen Crane occasionally used an apostrophe in the middle of words, as in

F'our
F'riend
F'eb [as in the abbreviation for "February"]

Has anyone seen this use before, and do you know what it means?

Paul Sorrentino (psorrent@vt.edu)
Virginia Tech