Letter elision and apostrophe direction... how do we know which apostrophe (‘) or (’) to use when indicating elided letters? Is there a specific rule on this? Are the examples below correct? ‘cause I’d hate like hell to... how ‘bout coming over? ‘Tis thou hast... ’Twas the night... Thank you.
From one Seth to another, I believe ’Twas the night is the correct one. Apostrophe to replace missing character(s) and tail to the left. I've learnt though that this is by consensus and have never found a definitive source (not that I've looked lately).
I think he's right about that. An apostrophe is not the same as an "open quote" (in the UK) or an "open quote-within-a-quote" (in the US), although word processors reflexively put the open quote at the beginning of a word.
I agree. You have to play around with the word processor to get the apostrophe in the right direction, because the WP assumes it's an opening quotation mark. But the apostrophe should always point with the tail to the left. There is no apostrophe with the tail to the right - that's just a single quotation mark.
