Recent work in cognitive rhetoric and the "poetics of mind" stresses the continuites rather than disjunctions between everyday linguistic usage--along with the thought processes presumed to underlie it--and figurative language. Apostrophe, the rhetorical figure identified by deconstructionist rhetoric as exemplifying the excessive, aberrant, "literary" character of figurative language, presents itself as an especially rich subject for reconsideration along cognitive lines. Far from typically striking hearers as unusual or "embarrassing," apostrophes pervade everyday discourse and are readily understood, although verbal artists can manipulate the objects and styles of apostrophic address to create unusual effects. Literary uses of apostrophe present a rough continuum, from familiar addresses to intimates to "bolder" invocations of inanimate objects or abstractions. The perceived unnaturalness of even the latter apostrophes, however, varies according to historical context. [A.R.]