One syllable...

Double Jeopardy. Category: Poetry in Early America. Clue: An anonymous poet addressed this man as "Great patron of the sailing crew / Who gav'st us weed to smoke and chew."

Contestant finally guessed "Scott - Scott??? - but it was Sir Walter Raleigh (of course).

Thing is - Alex pronounced "gav'st" with two syllables. "Gavest us weed..."

Alex ... that's why that apostrophe is there! To make it scan! One syllable, man...

(As Jonathan Swift griped, to no avail except losing the apostrophe:

There is another set of men who have contributed very much to the spoiling of the English tongue; I mean the poets from the time of the Restoration. These gentlemen, although they could not be insensible how much our language was already overstocked with monosyllables, yet, to save time and pains, introduced that barbarous custom of abbreviating words to fit them to the measure of their verses; and this they have frequently done so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious sounds, that none but a northern ear could endure. They have joined the most obdurate consonants without one intervening vowel, only to shorten a syllable; and their taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a poetical license not to be justified, they made their choice, alleging that the words pronounced at length sounded faint and languid. This was a pretence to take up the same custom in prose; so that most of the books we see now a-days are full of those manglings and abbreviations. Instances of this abuse are innumerable: what does your lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb'd, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others everywhere to be met in prose as well as verse? where, by leaving out a vowel to save a syllable, we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondered how it could ever obtain.

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