Mentioning Guns N’ Roses yesterday, I realised something: their use of punctuation in their name is perhaps not strictly correct!
Give yourself a moment to get over that shock. You see, I saw it pointed out somewhere recently that any time you abbreviate and to just a single N, it strictly should have two apostrophes, like so: ‘n’
The logic behind this is that when we make a contraction by removing a letter, we replace that letter with an apostrophe, as in don’t or I’m. But in contracting and, we’re removing two letters, and thus need to replace each with an apostrophe. It’s something I’d never really thought about before, but was obvious once I began to consider it.
So before I typed out the band’s name, I did a quick check to see how many apostrophes they use. Curiously, on their official logo (above) they don’t use an apostrophe at all, but the title of their website is Guns N’ Roses, so I decided to go with that as the official line, and use that in my post (they use the apostrophe, and lower-case O, correctly in the title of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by the way).
But are they really wrong in using one apostrophe? And are they alone in doing so? To answer the second question first: far from it. Usage seems to be fairly mixed, with probably slightly more cases of one apostrophe after the N than two, and even the occasional apostrophe before the N. And really, each way to do it is basically fine (though one apostrophe before the N does look a bit odd to me). It’s so relatively rare to abbreviate and in this way that no consensus has ever really formed on what the right way is.
There was one outlier that came up that I’d never noticed before, and that’s Toys “R” Us (I’m not going to try to replicate their cutesy backwards R). It seems odd to use quotation marks like that, but it’s still logical if you consider that they’re saying that it’s not really an R, as it in fact represents the word are.
Another chink in the armour of the two-apostrophes argument is that we replace two letters with one apostrophe all the time in English. Consider how we change can not/cannot to can’t. Or, every single contraction of have or has, e.g. I’ve, you’ve, he’s, she’s etc. Of course in these cases replacing each letter with an apostrophe would lead to to apostrophes side by side, which would look very strange, but still, it demonstrates exactly why we make exceptions to make language easier to digest.
So yes, you could argue that Guns N’ Roses et al should have two apostrophes, but one gets the message across that it’s a contraction just fine, and it looks better. Now let’s all enjoy some soothing Sunday morning sounds:
English-Language Thoughts 
So fun to watch Guns back in their prime! I used to like to make lists of rock bands that had spelled and punctuated things wrong (start with Beatles, lol!)
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Smart and dumb apostrophes and quotation marks make a difference: ideally, ‘n’ should have the same rightward curving apostrophe before as after, which I can’t reproduce on the this keyboard, but it’s the equivalent of )n).
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I thought of the same thing whole writing: another point in favour of using one apostrophe: no ambiguity as to whether it’s meant to be in quotation marks.
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Either way, they were a great band!
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Hear, hear!
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It makes it easier if you use their full name: G’N’F’N’R’ (I proudly printed that when making dividers for the rock/metal section in Zhivago 20 odd years ago……)
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Ha, I never noticed that! It actually looks good, as well as being accurate.
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[…] speech. This is the phenomenom by which we join words together when we speak, like how we say Guns n’ Roses, and don’t enunciate the and clearly. And of this course this shows us that not only does […]
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If ’n’ had two apostrophes (which I have never ever seen anywhere before), it should be that, ’n’, not ‘n’, am I right?
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Good question, you’re right, as the latter would be quotation marks.
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Either way, they were a great band!
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You’re off-base. There is no circumstance in which there should be two apostrophes AFTER the N, because it’s not “NAD”, it’s “AND”. Further, you indicate times where we contract using a single apostrophe for multiple letters, like “cannot/can not” to “can’t”. What you’re missing is that the substitution of an apostrophe for the letters doesn’t demand a single apostrophe for each letter, but for *each elision*. Every “left out” part, regardless of length. In the case of “cannot”, we are leaving out two letters, “NO”, but they are together. “CANnoT”->”CAN’T”.
In the case of the “and” in Guns N’ Roses, a grammatically proper reformation of the name would indeed be: “Guns ‘n’ Roses”. The first apostrophe replaces the “a”, and the second replaces the “d”, and each is a separate elision of letters (even if just one per), because the “n” separates them. Also, properly spelt, the “n” should be lowercase because, in proper title case, the fully spelt-out name would be “Guns and Roses”, not “Guns And Roses”, because you do not capitalise conjunctions (or three-or-fewer-letter words, depending on your style guide, but both apply) in title case unless they are the first or last word.
However, any band (or brand) can choose to style their name in a grammatically unique way, however inaccurate, as they please. That’s artistic license. The goth/industrial realm demonstrates plenty of these, such as [SITD] and :wumpscut:, though the most annoying may be “De/Vision” as that name makes it impossible to name a folder properly when sorting your tracks by artist.
Regarding Toys “Я” Us, your comment comes off as rather lazy, as it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to pull up a charmap/character viewer on any modern operating system (even in 2017), but barring that even a quick trip to the wikipedia page for the Cyrillic alphabet would give you a Cyrillic “ya” to copy and paste in.
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Adding this: there is a contraction that’s common in parts of the UK that does, indeed, use two apostrophes because they are separate: ’tisn’t.
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