‘98 Regency Brougham

The Secret History of Punctuation Mysteries

Ramping up into the final week of school, I wanted to chime in on cars and punctuation. The novel I am working on now is based very loosely on the toxic masculinity and sometimes violent misogyny my husband grew up around in 1970s suburban, white-boy Texas. That said, a minor main character in the book is cars. Even though the internet is awash with old car lore, I’m leaning heavily on my husband while learning how to write about and talk about cars of a certain era.

So, as a fun punctuation exercise, I’m going to turn to a typo (I think) some ladies in my cohort and I stumbled across in The Secret History by Donna Tartt (my current classroom read). The book mentions a ‘98 Regency Brougham, a car made by Oldsmobile between 1940 and the 1990s.

At first, my cohort friends thought it was a typo because, of course, why would a book written in 1992 be referencing a car still six years away from being made? That, and the point of telling is even older than that. Google quickly helped us clear up that 98 was actually a model number and not a model year—and further clarifies that “in 1941 both engines were offered on each series, so to differentiate between the two, the second digit was used to denote the number of cylinders; so the Custom Cruiser 90 was replaced with the Custom Cruiser 96 and 98… and in 1942 Oldsmobile dropped the six-cylinder Series 90 model, leaving only the Custom Cruiser 98.”

So, as for punctuation: the apostrophe—the way it’s used in the text—is an apostrophe for omission, which means that it’s used because part of a year has been omitted, which, in this paragraph, is not the case. At Trinity, our managing editor kept a file of all typos so that if a second or third printing of a book came around, the typo could be fixed in subsequent editions. The edition of The Secret History I am reading is from 2004, and the Kindle edition has the same typo, as well. So it would seem that in 33 years, the offending typo has not been corrected.

My question to all you grammar and car nerds out there is: is this a typo? Is there any case when it is OK to refer to a 98 Regency Brougham as a ‘98 Regency Brougham, other than a car that was made in 1998? I assume then it would be a ‘98 98 Regency Brougham, no? When it comes time to publish (fingers crossed) my own book, I wanna make sure I have all my cars in a row. :)

The Secret History, still providing mystery all these years later.