I've noticed that li'l is often spelled wrong, so I want to make it clear that the way that I've just spelled it is indeed the correct spelling, not that I recommend its frequent use.
Aside from its use in the possessive case ("Karen's son is getting so big!" "The Kravitzes are the Stephenses' nervous neighbors.") or to denote certain plurals ("Remember to dot your i's and cross your t's." "I bought my first CD's in the 1980's."), an apostrophe is also used to mark the omission of a letter or letters from a word. This is sometimes done to make contractions where two words are combined (don't=do+not, I'm=I+am), but can also be done to shorten a single word, as in the case of turning little into li'l, in which the apostrophe replaces two t's. [Note: The apostrophe isn't absolutely necessary or required in my above examples of "CD's" and "1980's." Those could be written as "CDs" and "1980s" and would still be considered acceptable by many grammarians, or in many cases those might actually be the preferred spellings.]
So, the skank-a-licious Lil' Kim gets it wrong. Even though her apostrophe could arguably be said to be replacing the missing e at the end of little, it's actually supposed to be replacing the two t's, as I said above (the silent e is just not accounted for in this instance). Back when the "artist" formerly known as Li'l Bow Wow, Kim's contemporary, was still known by that name, he actually got the name right... sometimes. He was occasionally credited as Lil' Bow Wow. It's tricky keeping up with the name changes of some of these "celebrities" when they seem to be changing their aliases more than con artists and grifters who are wanted by the police in a number of states.
I guess, technically, if it's your own name you can pretty much call yourself anything that you damned well please. You can be Li'l, L'il, Lil', or even 'Lil. I suppose I've seen more egregious name choices than these in the past decade or two, but that will be a topic for another day...
P.S. For the record, even that inbred, backwoods, redneck hillbilly Li'l Abner gets it right, so there's no excuse for anyone else to get it wrong.
