[HN Gopher] Apostrophe Protection Society
___________________________________________________________________
Apostrophe Protection Society
Author : Tomte
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-11-17 17:21 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apostrophe.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apostrophe.org.uk)
| kstrauser wrote:
| Oh wow, brace yourself for the flood of copy editors. Here it
| come's.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Its really not such a big deal.
| coldpie wrote:
| I always suggest people who aren't good at apostrophe rules
| to just leave them out entirely. Better to seem lazy than
| wrong, I figure.
| kibwen wrote:
| The irony is that smartphone keyboards seem to randomly
| replace correct "it's"s with incorrect "it's"s, so it
| actually takes more work to appear lazy by going back and
| correcting them.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| This is fantastic. I never noticed that's exactly how I
| interpret the total absence of appropriate punctuation.
| Bonus points if you ignore capitalization as well.
|
| I saw some guide to Zoomer communication recently which
| talked about how ... is perceived as "aggressive", which
| blew my mind. Better to just stick to lowercase letters.
| (Autocorrect makes this a pain though - I had to go back
| and fix the capitalization of "is" in the last sentence.)
| teddyh wrote:
| A contrarian view: <https://angryflower.com/495.html>
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| In this case, saying "I emptied the trashcans trash" and there
| are multiple cans, wouldn't clearly indicate that I only
| emptied one vs all of them.
| teddyh wrote:
| Per the link, the answer to your (and any) objection is
| "SILENCE!! OBEY!!!".
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Which is a followup to https://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
| teddyh wrote:
| Which is also available as a poster:
| <https://angryflower.com/aposter.html>
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The backtick`s better.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's up there with late 90s news people reading off new-
| fangled URLs for their viewers. "That's aytch tee tee pee colon
| backslash..."
|
| It made me want to do violence at the TV.
| gweinberg wrote:
| aitch
| mnw21cam wrote:
| This is most wonderfully lampooned by Terry Pratchett in Going
| Postal and Making Money.
|
| https://wiki.lspace.org/A._Parker_and_Son%27s
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/tyyo47/one_of_my...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I want to hear the pronunciation difference between sons and
| son's.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| There's an audiobook version...
|
| Edit: And a TV version, apparently.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think there's a small difference in intonation
| easeout wrote:
| What's the word for the vision equivalent of misophonia?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| It figures this is English.
|
| I sympathize, but I'm afraid that war's been lost. If I were to
| send in every example I see, it would be a full time job.
| yakubin wrote:
| there'dn't've
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZyZFa5qO0
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Doing god's work. There used to be a sign posted in a parking lot
| near me that said "METER'S TAKES QUARTER'S ONLY" that used to
| drive me nuts.
|
| Someone (likely an APS agent) even typed up a list of the
| grammatical errors made on the sign, and taped it to the bottom
| of it:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/y5ENADH.jpg
|
| Now we just need an agency to safeguard us against misusing
| "less" when "fewer" would be correct (like Avril Incandenza in
| _Infinite Jest_ ).
| jancsika wrote:
| > There used to be a sign posted in a parking lot near me that
| said "METER'S TAKES QUARTER'S ONLY" that used to drive me nuts.
|
| Right, a meter's coin slot takes a quarter's unit of value. :)
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| > _a_ meter 's
|
| There were multiple meters, the intent was to pluralize
| "meter." Which makes "takes" incorrect (vs "take"). Maybe I
| should get out more.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| " _Each_ meter's... "
|
| Just a poor choice if which words to elide for space. :)
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Perhaps there was a single meter which only took dimes?
| :)
| dduugg wrote:
| > Now we just need an agency to safeguard us against misusing
| "less" when "fewer" would be correct
|
| Genuinely curious, is this for pedantry, or does the word
| choice matter? Since the opposite of both is "more", why is
| there a need for a distinction in one direction and not the
| other?
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Does "The tank is too full, fill it with _fewer_ water next
| time " sound correct to you?
|
| "Fewer" typically refers to countables, "10 items or fewer."
|
| "Less" is used for things that don't have a plural form or
| are not countable, "there's less water in the pool this
| morning."
| etothepii wrote:
| The opposite of few maybe many, but many is not the
| opposite of fewer as the parent asks.
|
| Consider
|
| There are fewer people on the West Coast.
|
| There are many people on the East Coast.
|
| "Many," is not a comparator.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Fair enough, "additional" is an opposite of "fewer." I'll
| concede "more" is also.
|
| > The opposite of few maybe many
|
| "Maybe" is an adverb. Perhaps you meant "may be?" :)
| mc32 wrote:
| Morether. Like further but with more.
| ghaff wrote:
| Less instead of fewer sort of bugs me. But I've even seen
| less used in The Economist when I would have thought fewer
| was more correct so I think the answer is it's pedantry at
| this point. (To be clear, pedantry in the sense that less can
| be (usually?) substituted for fewer but not the other way
| around.)
| cbsmith wrote:
| I read that as, "we've already committed atrocities with
| more, why wouldn't we do the same with less"? ;-)
| retrac wrote:
| The underlying distinction is about mass versus countable
| nouns.
|
| You can't refer to a sheet of paper as "a paper" (that refers
| to something else - a completed document). And you can't call
| a piece of furniture "a furniture", nor can you ask for "a
| scissors". They are mass nouns, inherently plural, referring
| to an abstract, indefinite amount of something. (Or in
| English, something coming in pairs, like scissors.) To refer
| to a specific instance, you need to use a determiner like "a
| piece of paper".
|
| Or a head of cattle. You can't have two cattles. You have two
| head of cattle. Cattle come in a herd with an ambiguous
| number of them Other nouns are count nouns, and can be
| directly counted; they're definitive. A cat, two cats, four
| cats. Count nouns go with "fewer". Mass nouns go with "less".
| Over-educated writers might make a distinction here where
| "fewer cattle" is visualizing a few individuals, while "less
| cattle" is visualizing a smaller herd. I do think that's
| overly pedantic. Very few people make that distinction
| cleanly.
|
| Some languages have no concept of count nouns at all, all
| nouns are mass nouns. Some languages have no concept of mass
| nouns, and all nouns are count nouns. Or nearly so. English
| has and uses both. Some cases are sort of blurry or unclear.
| "Six rains" = it has rained six times. That's maybe
| grammatical, but it's very unnatural in English. We do not
| feel we can count the times it rains, that way. It has to
| qualify a word that can be counted, like "times" - a pattern
| so common we get abbreviated counter words like "once" and
| "twice". Most languages have a touch of both patterns. Even
| in Chinese, which supposedly has no count nouns, there a few
| places when you do just count things directly.
|
| So, no, it's not necessary. But if your language does make
| the distinction, it's very common for agreement patterns to
| show up based around that distinction. Akin to how French
| adjectives agree with their noun in number and gender.
| kstrauser wrote:
| They didn't apostrophize TAKE'S? Barbarian's.
| rvbissell wrote:
| I'm actually more upset that I can't find a readable closeup of
| the affixed corrections, than I am about the posted sign.
| xkekjrktllss wrote:
| The owner (dictator) of the parking lot can do whatever he
| wants. His intelligence is evidenced in his wealth. That's how
| the free market works.
| autoexec wrote:
| > His intelligence is evidenced in his wealth. That's how the
| free market works.
|
| Yet we have so so many stupid rich people and many many more
| brilliant poor people.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Not apostrophe-related, but you just reminded me of a sign I
| kept seeing at my local hospital a while back. It said (and I
| took a picture of it, because it bugged me so much):
| NO PETS No Dogs or Pets Trained Guide Dogs or
| Service Animals Welcome No dogs or pets are allowed.
|
| When I read this, I imagine a guy with thick glasses and a
| white lab coat feeding these rules into a wall-sized 1950s
| computer and smoke coming out.
| kzrdude wrote:
| There is something subtly nostalgic and pleasant with how
| that notice is written. (The old-fashioned style.)
| oxonia wrote:
| Have you ever read 'The Monkey Wrench', by Gordon Dickson?
|
| https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v47n06_1951-08_MadMax.
| ..
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| In a time when a more and more people can't spell "too," it
| seems ambitious to school them on "less" vs. "fewer."
|
| But when I do try to explain why "less" and "fewer" are not
| interchangeable, I usually just say, "Do you want fewer syrup
| on your pancakes?"
|
| Then there's "transition" as a verb: Do you illumination a room
| when it's dark?
|
| We can go on and on, but we can't leave this one out: "would
| of." I always call that out in any comment forum. This just
| can't be let go.
|
| And now, Weird Al has some words:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
| BalinKing wrote:
| > But when I do try to explain why "less" and "fewer" are not
| interchangeable, I usually just say, "Do you want fewer syrup
| on your pancakes?"
|
| This feels like a strawman: As evidenced by the fact that
| everyone would agree your example sentence is ungrammatical,
| clearly "less" and "fewer" are not strictly interchangeable,
| either prescriptively _or_ descriptively.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't see how your
| example is relevant to the cases where people do in fact use
| "less" to mean "fewer" (or vice versa).
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > And now, Weird Al has some words
|
| A linguist had some words in response[0]
|
| > While "grammar nerds" are psyched about Weird Al's new
| "Word Crimes" video, many linguists are shaking their heads
| and feeling a little hopeless about what the public
| enthusiasm about it represents: a society where largely
| trivial, largely arbitrary standards of linguistic
| correctness are heavily privileged, and people feel justified
| in degrading and attacking those who don't do things the
| "correct" way.
|
| I know who I'm trusting to speak confidently about language
| usage.
|
| [0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13521
| autoexec wrote:
| > In a time when a more and more people can't spell "too," it
| seems ambitious to school them on "less" vs. "fewer."
|
| Over half of the American population reads below a 6th grade
| level. We should encourage them to improve at every
| opportunity.
| hlandau wrote:
| I have an almost, but not quite, completely unrelated anecdote
| about this.
|
| I got on the internet in the early 2000s as a teenager, and would
| often be in various online chatrooms. Tricking people into
| visiting "shock sites" (most famously goatse.cx) seemed to be a
| common habit of certain denizens of these communities, either to
| people they didn't like or just because they thought it was
| funny.
|
| Somehow I managed to avoid ever falling victim to this, but there
| was one exception I recall, in which I was linked to a website
| purporting to be website of the "Apostrophe Protection Society".
| After only a moment some kind of JavaScript kicked in to instead
| change the contents of the page to some goatse.cx-style shock
| image which I don't recall. In other words, the "Apostrophe
| Protection Society" page just existed as a kind of bait-and-
| switch cover.
|
| I quickly closed the page, and ironically what I ended up
| remembering is not anything about the shock image but the notion
| of the "Apostrophe Protection Society". I think at the time I
| assumed that the notion of the "Apostrophe Protection Society"
| was intended to be part of the joke - that nobody would ever
| actually make such an organisation.
|
| I never bumped into that site again, but for heaven knows why (my
| memory is scary sometimes) I still remember the existence of this
| site pretending to be about an "Apostrophe Protection Society"
| (or some similar title).
|
| So, TIL it actually is real - and actually a legitimate
| organisation. Presumably whoever made the above website must have
| picked the website at random and copied its contents. Well, I
| hope this random anecdote about what the web used to be like is
| of interest to someone...
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _(most famously Goatse)_
|
| No! speaking of lost punctuation marks, even more humorously
| goatse.cx
|
| it's pronounced "goatsex". get it? get the leet joke? the joke
| doesn't work if you misinterpret the semantic versioning
| "point" as a full stop. full stop.
| hlandau wrote:
| Fixed ;)
| caseyohara wrote:
| First sentence from Wikipedia: "goatse.cx, often spelled
| without the .cx top-level domain as Goatse, was an internet
| domain that originally housed an Internet shock site."
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I dont think theyre that important.
| joegahona wrote:
| The omission rules are what I see bungled most these days, as
| well as typographical things like the wrong version of the smart
| apostrophe appearing in the wrong place.
|
| Errors like "They want to outlaw Christian's" are easily
| avoidable; just stay away from Facebook comments.
| taylorbuley wrote:
| kill the curly quote
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| In favor of the _neutral_ single quote ( ')? Are you using a
| typewriter?!
| fbdab103 wrote:
| When the name ends in an "s", you either add an apostrophe and
| "s" or just an apostrophe. - James's pen or James' pen
| - Mr Jones's van or Mr Jones' van
|
| Who accepts the first style? I thought this was a non-negotiable
| error.
|
| Edit: American
| kstrauser wrote:
| I was taught the former. You'd pronounce the "'s" if you were
| speaking it, rather than saying "Mr Jones van" or "James pen".
| moribvndvs wrote:
| I use s' and it's one of the more frequent corrections
| suggested to me, but that's what was taught to me in grade and
| high school.
| ghaff wrote:
| Both AP (usually--unless the following word starts with an s)
| and Chicago prefer s-apostrophe-s for singular nouns. Though,
| on their website, Chicago seems fairly ambivalent about it.
| The bottom line is that a copyeditor may correct you but it's
| pretty far away from grammatical faux pas territory.
| (Personally I go with just s-apostrophe.)
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| I only accept the first style, because I pronounce it "Jameses
| pen", not "James pen". If there are multiple choices and one
| more closely resembles the spoken language, I don't see any
| reason to save a written letter. Otherwise you have "James'
| pen" being pronounced "Jameses pen", but "the voters' choice"
| for some reason is not pronounced "the voterses choice". You
| end up with one specific circumstance where an apostrophe is
| actually pronounced, and I really don't like that.
|
| I'm also American.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I don't add the extra s, nor do I speak it aloud. Also
| American (western).
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| So you'd pronounce "I have James' pen" as "I have James
| pen"?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I do. It's rare to be confusing.
|
| And if it were, I would not do Jameses, I would go
| traditional and say James his pen (since 's is a
| contraction of his)
| kstrauser wrote:
| It's not a contraction. It's a possessive, and
| specifically _not_ a contraction of "James his".
| iNerdier wrote:
| In the UK I would say the latter is incorrect and would never
| use it in writing.
| mkehrt wrote:
| Wait, you don't think "James'" is acceptable _at all_? What
| about "Jesus'", which is pretty common as an affected
| archaism?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Everyone who was taught s' is only for plural words.
| tom_ wrote:
| The rule is there to eliminate a 3rd -s noise. James's is fine.
| Moses's or Jesus's is less so (but you can do it if you want).
| ghaff wrote:
| AP (usually), Chicago, and The Economist style guides all
| specify the first use for singular nouns--so it does seem to be
| officially preferred in both US and British English. Which I
| did not actually know.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I thought about this for a bit a month or two back. I decided
| that I was consistent about my spelling matching my
| pronunciation (though a -s' one still entails a very subtle
| adjustment of the final phoneme compared to its -s origin), but
| I couldn't find any consistent rule I was following about the
| pronunciation. Number of syllables was readily falsified;
| concluding phoneme (/s/ like Chris or /z/ like James) was
| readily falsified; I didn't delve far enough into the
| concluding _syllable_ (e.g. "Jesus'" already ends in /z@z/,
| ending in /z@z@z/ just makes me think of Smeagol and his
| fisheses), so there _may_ still be a pattern, but for now I
| think it may just be irregular.
|
| Pronunciation-dependent spelling is not novel in English: "a"
| and "an" are the same word, but the choice depends on the
| succeeding phoneme. The King James Version of the Bible uses
| the phrase "an horse for an hundred pieces of silver", showing
| that the dominant accent at the time used a silent _h_ in both
| words: "an 'orse for an 'undred pieces of silver". I
| contemplated the matter a few years ago and decided that "a
| horse for a hundred pieces of silver" was a more reasonable
| reading of the phrase in Australian English (though most will
| diligently read the clumsy "an horse, _& c._").
|
| This is one of the subtleties across accents. An American might
| write "an herb" because they'll pronounce it "an 'erb", whereas
| an Australian would write "a herb" because we sound the _h_.
| kej wrote:
| The variations of "an h-" are one of my favorite things to
| stumble on, because it's one of the few times that the
| written word tells you what kind of accent the writer has.
| mkehrt wrote:
| These are definitely both acceptable.
|
| In fact I'd go so far as to say that the apostrophe-only style
| ("James'") is somewhat archaic and definitely out of fashion.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Thanks for bringing this up. I usually wonder which of the
| styles is correct..
| alecnotthompson wrote:
| People care about the darnedest thing's
| philk10 wrote:
| Maybe by coincidence but a missing apostrophe was in the news
| today - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
| news/2023/nov/17/hampshire-vi...
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Probably not a coincidence. I read that article today too; the
| submitter could very well have done that and went to the linked
| website afterwards.
| sowbug wrote:
| Related reading: https://begthequestion.info/
| benrutter wrote:
| I found it interesting to learn that possessive apostrophes are
| more or less an English language only thing. Possessive word
| endings ("Tomes pen") used to be a thing, but I guess got
| abbreviated so much (Tom's pen) they no longer exist.
| etothepii wrote:
| This is very interesting, do you have a source?
|
| In eats, shoots and leaves I recall the claim being made that
| apostrophes can be used for plurality with borrowed words. A
| particular example would thus be the "potato". Therefore, a so-
| called grocer's apostrophe to pluralise potato would be ok,
| while to pluralise turnip it would not.
|
| Similarly it was considered appropriate for pluralising numbers
| and days of the week. "There are fifty-two Wednesday's in a
| normal year." However, if the contraction argument were correct
| then "Tomes Pen" -> "Tom's Pen" could also allow "Potatoes" ->
| "Potato's"
| benrutter wrote:
| I said it from memory, but googling looks like meriam webster
| has a nice article: https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/grammar/history-and-use-of-t...
| eszed wrote:
| A professor of mine used to say that the original form (don't
| know what time period; he never explained that) was "Tom, his
| pen", so therefore the apostrophe still indicates elided
| characters. I don't know whether his example is correct, or
| yours, or both, but they're clearly pointing in the same
| direction.
| pge wrote:
| Since English is a Germanic language, it seems more likely to
| me that the possessive 's' is a carryover from the German
| genitive case. Pure speculation, but perhaps the apostrophe
| was added as case endings disappeared from English (except
| for the rare exceptions like who/whom)
| aimor wrote:
| I like this. But now it's tempting to use 'r for plural
| nouns.
| benrutter wrote:
| Looks like both are right apparently? Although, mainly your
| professor's: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/history-
| and-use-of-t...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _John Richards, self-confessed pedant and founder of the
| Apostrophe Protection Society - obituary, 24 April 2021_
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/04/24/john-richa...
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| In the UK a misplaced apostrophe (in a plural or in possessive
| its) is called a "greengrocers' apostrophe", presumably due to
| folks in that trade being particularly susceptible to errors in
| their signs, in turn partially due to the slightly unusual nature
| of the nouns they are pluralising; "bananas" is slightly teasing
| you to stick one in, but "mangos" more so as just looks like a
| Greek island otherwise, unless you opt for the -oes form.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Ha. That makes sense, I wonder why or how that became a thing?
|
| It's the same case in the US -- you see it most in locally
| owned mom-and-pop style stores, especially ones that have been
| around for a while.
|
| It genuinely makes me wonder if it's out of ignorance, or if
| it's intentionally keeping a kind of old-school charm. "If
| apostrophes were good enough for my grandfather, they're good
| enough for me!"
|
| Of course, there's also a store local to me that has "&" on
| its big sign instead of "&", so I don't want to read in too
| much intention. (And you can tell it's not the kind of business
| that can afford to have a replacement sign made.)
| justincormack wrote:
| Fond of signs saying things like "sparrowgrass" at greengrocers
| or market stalls too.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Three on the page:
|
| > _If you're looking for guidance on the correct use of
| apostrophes, ..._
|
| > _It 's free, so why not join today!_
|
| > _Do please have a browse and see if there's anything you want
| to purchase._
|
| I'm genuinely disappointed at this inconsistency: the first and
| third use curly quotes, the second uses straight quotes. They
| should pick one style (which, for such an organisation, should I
| think fairly clearly be the curly, unless they go bizarre and
| decide that U+0027 APOSTROPHE's name is enough to warrant
| protecting it despite its inferiority to U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE
| QUOTATION MARK) and stick with it assiduously.
|
| They've also got a pair of double quotes on the quotation at the
| end, and they're straight.
| cxr wrote:
| I have to object to the recommendation to fix an error that
| results in a "corrected" form that reads
|
| > 1000s of bargains here!
|
| The problem with a sentence that says "1000's" isn't just the
| presence of the apostrophe. "1000" is not a substitute for the
| word "thousand". It means "one thousand". "1000s" therefore is a
| nonsense construction, apostrophe or not, unless you're talking
| about years or other number ranges. The same goes for "millions",
| etc, as well as "hundreds". (This doesn't apply to 10; "10s of
| thousands" is acceptable and correct.)
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| So the Apostrophe Protection Society is the apostrophe's
| protection society?
| o11c wrote:
| The "use" page is missing several details, some important:
|
| * 1 The non-ASCII apostrophe is always ', so programs that
| automatically insert smart quotes do the _wrong_ thing for
| apostrophes at the start of a word. Some better examples IMHO:
| 'tis (it is), 'nuff (enough), 'cause (because), 'em (them),
| 'fraid (afraid), 'n' (and),
|
| * 2 The "name ends with s" rule also applies to names ending with
| "x".
|
| * 3 is arguably just a special case of 2 (e.g. we can say "a
| holiday of two weeks"), but note that this is very similar to the
| attributive use (7) which never+ uses the plural or an apostrophe
| but does use a hyphen (a two-week holiday).
|
| * 5 There are, in fact, grammatically-valid uses of "its'", when
| "it" is a noun rather than a pronoun. A non-derogatory example,
| in some variants of tag (the children's game), the its' advantage
| increases over time.
|
| * 6 Whether apostrophes are used for plurals of non-words is a
| matter of style, not correctness.
|
| * 7, + Some apparent exceptions are due to words that are
| actually collective instead of plural for the particular use
| case. For example, "arms industry" is like "clothes industry".
| More often, people use errors and omit the required apostrophe.
| "farmers market" is an abomination.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Technically, ' isn't an apostrophe at all, but a right single
| quotation mark. I honestly thought this post was going to
| finally be some validation of my annoyance at everyone using
| the wrong Unicode character just because font makers make the
| apostrophe more "ugly".
| geesh wrote:
| Absolutely not, the Unicode Standard explicitly states that
| U+2019 (') RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK "is the preferred
| character to use for apostrophe". You can see this in the
| code chart at https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf
| and it is restated in section "Apostrophes", 6.2 General
| Punctuation.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Huh, TIL. That's kind of annoying but good to know, thanks!
| couchand wrote:
| The "name ends with s" rule is surprisingly permissive -- I'm
| surprised an organization that claims to work to protect the
| apostrophe would allow one to be stripped of its due support
| 's'. And without an analogous rule for non-name nouns ending in
| 's', it's just needlessly inconsistent.
|
| Protect the apostrophe! Demand the rightful 's'!
| kibwen wrote:
| On the other hand, given the marginal utility of the apostrophe
| (relative to, say, the comma or the parenthesis) as well as the
| fact that so many people seem to have a hard time keeping it
| straight, Im tempted to conclude thats evidence that we should
| just get rid of it outright.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| FYI: The translucent background on the text makes
| https://www.apostrophe.org.uk/apostrophe-use hard to read.
|
| Perhaps bump up the opacity one more notch?
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Sort of OT, but the list of uses
| (https://www.apostrophe.org.uk/apostrophe-use) matches what I do
| _except_ for "6. Apostrophes are NEVER used to denote plurals!"
|
| I was taught that for numbers and acronyms, you _do_ use
| apostrophes.
|
| Was anyone else taught that? Or am I the only one?
| Vinnl wrote:
| Heh, I have two related pet peeves.
|
| The first is kinda the opposite of this website's problem: people
| using apostrophes to denote possession _in Dutch_. That 's
| supposed to be wrong, but people have adopted it from English.
| (Though supposedly, it was also already fairly widespread before
| English was. I'm also not so sure whether it can realistically be
| considered wrong nowadays, given its prevalence.)
|
| The other is _should 've_. That's a contraction, and the original
| is _should have_ , not _should of_. Funnily enough this is a
| mistake no Dutch person (or non-native speaker in general, I
| think) makes, but I see it a lot online.
|
| And finally, I wonder how many mistakes I made in this comment
| arp242 wrote:
| Conversely, a lot of Dutch people use apostrophes for plurals
| in English, probably more so than the average non-native
| speaker, because that's considered correct in Dutch.
|
| Mixing languages is hard. I've lived abroad for a few years I
| can no longer tell the time in Dutch. Does "half two" mean
| "half past two" (14:30) or "half of two" (13:30)? From where
| I'm sitting now, I'm genuinely not sure; in (British) English
| it's usually the latter, although that's confusing as well
| because Americans usually mean the former (or was it the
| reverse?)
|
| Maybe I'm just stupid - I've never been able to recite the
| alphabet either (always get confused somewhere after O/P).
| technothrasher wrote:
| I was ranting one day a few years ago at work about all the
| laminated signs such as "clean your dishes" or "flush the toilet"
| around and why they were useless at actually altering behavior. I
| came in the next day and one of my co-workers had had the great
| idea to stick a laminated sign in my lab that said, "Do not place
| lamanated sign's in this lab". I have left it up to this day
| because of the misspelling and misuse of the apostrophe, it
| always makes me laugh.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| That's very Fight Club
| pseingatl wrote:
| How an Apostrophe Almost Landed Me in Jail:
|
| https://mu7ami.micro.blog/2023/01/02/how-an-apostrophe.html
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't get why people get all bothered by this kind of stuff.
| The reason people make these mistakes is because it's all
| pronounced exactly the same, and no one is confused by what "It's
| wrong" and "Its wrong" means, when pronounced or when written.
|
| The "Correct Use of the Apostrophe in the English Language" page
| claims that the rules are "very simple". If they're that simple
| then why do you need 8 bullet-points and five screens of text to
| explain these "very simple" rules?
|
| I wish people were more relaxed about this kind of thing. Just
| accept "its" and "it's" as correct, and "Two week's time" and
| "Two weeks' time", etc. No one gets confused by this sort of
| thing.
|
| Our brains are geared towards spoken language, not written
| language. My main take-aware from this is that we should change
| the spelling to be less error-prone, or just accept both as
| correct. The problem is with the spelling, not the people.
| easeout wrote:
| The problem is not that it's confusing but that, because the
| rules exist and set our expectations, we mentally trip over
| violations of them. We stop absorbing what was intended to be
| communicated and have to back up and try again. I don't
| disagree that changing the rules would solve this, but we
| haven't done that. So in individual instances of written
| communication which each of us does have the power to affect,
| it's on the writer to ensure the reader has no unnecessary
| trouble. I could wear boots inside your house, but I'd rather
| you clean up the Lego.
| damiante wrote:
| >It's free, so why not join today!
|
| Evidently their passion for punctuation does not extend to the
| question mark.
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