Punctuation isn't something I spend much time thinking about, even though I make a living, in part, by writing and checking over what other people write.

It's not to say I don't understand punctuation. As grammar people go, I'd say I'm punctuation proficient. Since the devices that replaced typewriters, once referred to as word processors, but now known as desktop and laptop computers came into being, a particular bit of punctuation has crossed the threshold from being an afterthought of the writing process to an irritating little sliver of ink that's apt to hook the wrong way or translate into some errant version of a letter of the alphabet.

This curious reality has caused me to spend more time thinking about punctuation than I'd like. To quote a line from the Frank Zappa song "Evelyn, A Modified Dog," "...the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe." The tune appears on the Zappa album entitled "Apostrophe (')," which pre-dates the age of personal computers and word processing programs. The late Mr. Zappa's concern with the punctuation, therefore, would appear to focus on a different matter than mine does.

What it comes down to for me (that is to say the crux of the biscuit), is that two decades into the era of computers being in very common use, we have yet to come up with a version of the apostrophe that can readily move about on the Internet, in email and from Mac to PC without being transformed into some other character like ç, or into an apostrophe that hooks the wrong way, as in "it just doesn't look right that way."

It's a strange problem because apostrophes are really not much different from letters. After all, there are lower-case variants of a and g and the computer crowd has pretty much figured out how to deal with them.

If you go with the theory that the apostrophe evolved out of the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, yod, which kind of looks more like a bit of punctuation than a proper letter, it has been around every bit as long as any variant of a or g, so there's really no reason why it should be so difficult to deal with in the world of computer programming as it seems to have become.

There are folks who have come to the conclusion that the apostrophe should be increasingly excised from contractions in common use. Terry Southern, one of the writers of the screenplay for the movie "Easy Rider," leaves the apostrophes out of his contractions in his stories, but generally follows the other rules of grammar. This works fine for can't (cant) and don't (dont), but not for won't, which is short for will not even as wont is a synonym for apt or in the practice of. Still, there may be something to this business of eliminating apostrophes. After all, we've already started with the possessive pronouns his, her and (confusingly) its.

I guess what it comes down to with the apostrophe is it has about half a dozen official and semi-official punctuation duties. Back in first grade, we learned it serves as the surgical scar when you remove letters to form a contraction like don't for do not. It's also called upon to set the letter s off from a noun that is possessive of something else, as in the dog's biscuit. There's also the matter of the apostrophe being essentially the same thing as a single quotation mark, which is used when you are quoting someone who is quoting someone else. Furthermore, a standard quotation mark is little more than two apostrophes (or four, depending on how you look at it) corralling a gathering of words said by someone other than the writer.

It also falls to the apostrophe to serve as an accent mark in certain words like cafe' because the old typewriter keyboards demanded it and, even though computer keyboards are a good deal more versatile, the accent mark generally involves a different permutation of finger gymnastics for each word processing program on the market.

Standardization of the apostrophe should have been taken care of years ago, as it was for the comma, but, unfortunately, it looks to me like we're many years from getting beyond the problem of apostrophes hooking the wrong way.

Possibly, I should just get used to it and stop spending so much time thinking about punctuation.