@gailcalled, I’ve never even thought about that before. I guess I just classify as “punctuation” all the notational elements we use that are not literal or numeric symbols. Oh, wait. No, I don’t. An ampersand, percent sign, and crosshatch (“pound sign”) are not punctuation, and of course mathematical operators are not either. They’ve been termed “special characters” for computer purposes. Let me think.
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<pondering>
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Well, unlike an ampersand (and others), an apostrophe has no meaning at all when it stands alone. So it’s not exactly a symbol. It doesn’t have the same kind of operational value as a period or a quotation mark, whose meaning can be defined apart from context. And I don’t think it ever actually stands for or replaces letters. It can signify the omission of letters in some uses, but that is not the same thing.
What I am working up to here is I don’t know. I think perhaps it is sometimes a mark of punctuation and sometimes not, just as a period is sometimes a full stop and sometimes a decimal point. “Other-named usage” will do for me in the meantime.
Thanks, Gail. Now I have to go study on apostrophes. I wish you had asked me about apostrophe as a poetic device; I can tell you what that means.
I did get your -O string. :)