Long before anyone heard a note, Taylor Swift’s new album caused controversy among the grammarians.
The fuss was about the title, The Tortured Poets Department, and its conspicuously absent apostrophe. Should “poets” not have been possessive? If it had been, was the singular or plural more appropriate? Was this a mistake? Or by design? English teachers, grammar hobbyists, and the standards editor of The New York Times weighed in. There is, they said, no intrinsically correct answer—just one that differs based on the album title’s intended meaning. The Tortured Poet’s Department, for example, would imply a department belonging to a singular tortured poet, and perhaps her place of work or where one could go to find her. The Tortured Poets’ Department would suggest a similar situation, just with all the tortured poets. In omitting the apostrophe altogether, it’s the authors themselves who go under the microscope in The Tortured Poets Department—though perhaps the singular would have been most appropriate.
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