Grammar Rant

"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
05/02/2014 at 16:32 • Filed to: rant, grammar

Grammar rant after the jump. Here's a 1976 Spirit of Le Mans Widebody C3 Corvette, whose livery will become appropriate after you read my rant.

In the age of the Internet, the English language has taken quite a beating: text message spellings in common usage, misspellings, the death of the gerund. But nothing depresses and infuriates me more than the ever increasing misuse of the humble apostrophe.

The apostrophe has two basic uses:

The marking of the omission of one or more letters or numbers (as in the contraction of do not to don't, or 1976 to '76 ).

The marking of possessive case (as in the eagle's feathers , or in one month's time ).

With only a few notable exceptions, PLEASE DO NOT USE AN APOSTROPHE TO MAKE A WORD PLURAL . Generally, the only time you use an apostrophe to create a plural is for written items that are not words established in English orthography (as in P's and Q's ). But even that is open to heated debate.

So, friends, please write:

Ferraris often burst into flames and not Ferrari's often burst into flame's

Asshats don't know how to park their BMWs and not Asshat's don't know how to park their BMW's

I love cars from the 1960s rather than I love car's from the 1960's

Save your pixels, save your toner, save your keystrokes, and don't use an apostrophe to make a word plural. If you're weird like me, and this sort of thing interests you, there is a good discussion of specific situations that call for an apostrophe in the formation of a plural at !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

/end rant

Pic via !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!

DISCUSSION (36)

Dunnik > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 16:34

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"Well, I'm a panda," he says. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. " Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves. "'

ttyymmnn > Dunnik
05/02/2014 at 16:36

Not surprisingly, I've read that book . It's a little precious at times, but otherwise very good. If you're a Grammar Nerd like me.

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

SnapUndersteer, Italian Spiderman > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 16:36

I support you in this endeavor; wholeheartedly.

cazzyodo > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 16:36

I have had frequent arguments with my brother. I bought my family a phone plan a few years ago and he refused to go the route of T9 on a flip-phone...this resulted in all sorts of abbreviated statements. Understandable.

Fast forward to last summer as he prepped to head off to school. He buys his first smartphone.

First text he sends to me is abbreviated. My response was something like "dude, you have a smartphone with autocorrect. Don't send me messages like this."

sry...blah blah blah abbreviated words and crap

I basically exploded at him when I got home.

Also, his handwriting blows.

ttyymmnn > cazzyodo
05/02/2014 at 16:37

Sadly, my handwriting is terrible, too. I simply don't use pen and pencil any more. I type everything.

lone_liberal > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 16:38

I've been trying my best to follow that rule, but when I pluralize iPhone 5S without something between the "S" and the "s" it still looks strange to me.

cazzyodo > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 16:38

There's a difference between bad handwriting and handwriting that hasn't progressed since third grade.

His is the latter.

ttyymmnn > lone_liberal
05/02/2014 at 16:39

I believe that would follow under the exception for "words not established in English orthography," and the apostrophe would be correct.

ttyymmnn > cazzyodo
05/02/2014 at 16:40

You haven't seen me write.... But, point taken.

hollanddjw 1 > lone_liberal
05/02/2014 at 16:43

5Esses?

hollanddjw 1 > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 16:44

Whats the problem? I dont see why you guy's are so upset.

ttyymmnn > hollanddjw 1
05/02/2014 at 16:46

Kinja'd!!!

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 16:47

I think a lot of it stems from the fact that proper nouns tend to look wrong in a plural form - particularly if the noun in question is heavily used in trademark and rarely plural. It's just enough when one is questioning one's own use to recall seeing the few exception cases (the aforementioned "P's and Q's" for example) and think (or merely induce on a subconscious level) that the way to "preserve" the pure form of a specialized proper noun is the apostrophe.

Not trying to excuse those who fall in the trap, but I think that's why it occurs.

jariten1781 > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 16:49

The possessive of "it" has always confused me. Is it "it's" or "its" and how does it work with the conjunction of "it is"? Do grammarians just avoid it like they tend to do with most confusing things?

ttyymmnn > jariten1781
05/02/2014 at 16:56

It is confusing, because the possessive form it "it" does NOT use an apostrophe. The possessive form of "it" is "its", as in, "The engine blew its head gasket." The contraction of "it is" uses the apostrophe to become "it's." The apostrophe takes the place of the "i" in "is".

thebigbossyboss > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 17:00

I have had whole pages of university exams marked "Can't Read" with a big X on them because of my handwriting.

thebigbossyboss > cazzyodo
05/02/2014 at 17:02

So is mine. And my father's, and my brother's. (I really hope this was good usage of apostrophes and if not please forgive).

thebigbossyboss > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 17:03

So it is the opposite of the rest of language. I always screw that one up too.

thebigbossyboss > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 17:06

Is "baleen whale" a proper noun, or is it just a noun, the same as "whale"

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
05/02/2014 at 17:08

That's an interesting hypothesis, but the apostrophe has become so common on just about any plural noun (and some verbs for that matter), that people are just coming to believe that it is correct.

We got a flyer from our boys' school advertising Teacher Appreciation Week. The kids were asked to write a sentence or two saying why the "Teacher's and Staff Rock!" The flyer went on to talk about how Teacher Appreciation Week "let's the teacher's and staff know" how much they are appreciated. I think this was written by a parent, not a teacher, but it still went out to the entire elementary school.

ttyymmnn > thebigbossyboss
05/02/2014 at 17:09

Just a noun. At the beginning of a sentence, "baleen" would be capitalized. In the middle of a sentence, it would not.

ttyymmnn > thebigbossyboss
05/02/2014 at 17:10

Not really opposite, just an exception. The apostrophe is reserved for the omission resulting from the contraction, and not used for the possessive. It was probably done this way to avoid confusion, but ended up causing more confusion instead.

It's similar to "whose" vs. "who's." The former is possessive, while the latter is the contraction of "who is."

ttyymmnn > thebigbossyboss
05/02/2014 at 17:13

Absolutely correct. And just to make it even MORE confusing, there are some grammarians who advocate the ditching the apostrophe altogether, saying that the context will tell you if the word is possessive or not. If you wrote or said, "The dogs toy," it's pretty clear that "dog" is possessive. I'm not in favor of this change.

thebigbossyboss > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 17:14

Very good. Thanks!

Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 17:26

I think what I was trying to suggest is that this sort of breakdown had to have come from somewhere originally, and probably had to first proliferate (exist, really) among the semi-educated to be common enough to be available for adoption by the rabble.

ttyymmnn > Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull
05/02/2014 at 17:31

I have to disagree. I learned my grammar well before the Internet age, and I don't recall seeing this phenomenon at all until the last 15 years or so. It's a mistake that I think even the semi-educated wouldn't have made. The rise of the Internet has brought the Rabble to the fore, and even the least educated of us has an equal voice (just look at Jalopnik comments!). I'm not saying that's bad at all; I'm all in favor or democracy. It's just that as the Rabble has grown louder, the educated man has been pushed to the background, and education and proper grammar has become something for snobs and elites. Which makes me sound like an elite snob, doesn't it?

Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 17:41

Regardless of origin, I wonder how much of the initial spread was international English-speaking and how much was home-grown stupidity? If one's a betting man, one never bets against organic stupid in its natural habitat, but it has all the marks of people thinking something is a *rule* that isn't. *Most* foreign pathways to English stress grammar better than that, but there are exceptions and people forget... Not to mention quite a few languages having special handling rules for proper nouns.

ttyymmnn > Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull
05/02/2014 at 17:51

I'm not a betting man, but I'm also not betting against home grown stupid. My own theory is that it comes from people who are trying to sound educated and, in so doing, end up sounding stupid. They're just thinking too hard. Have you ever heard a cop give an interview? They try to sound all official and educated, and end up sounding like morons. My favorite is, "At this point in (and) time." Why not just say, "Now"?

Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 17:52

I want to say I saw this a time or two in the mid-90s, when I was still a kid. (A kid with pretensions toward becoming Spelling Hitler, but I digress). It wasn't common then, but I think it did exist: it might be that those guilty of it didn't have the ability to spread - in other words, natural causes, but it required breaking down of barriers to multiply far and wide enough to imprint itself on the Great Illiterate.

If I were to expand my hypothesis, regardless whether it has any truth, I'd ponder the relevance of "whole word" pronunciation. It might impact the tendency to see an uncommon variety of a word as "wrong" and to have reflexes in general based on how a word "looks". I learned phonics like most of my generation - in theory - but since I learned to read at an extremely early age, there's a strong "whole word" element to my reading that wasn't taught. I can tell you that I forwarded the hypothesis because proper nouns "look wrong" in the plural to me personally - it's just a reflex I've learned to ignore, and FTR a plural with apostrophe looks wrong as well, just in a different way.

Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 17:55

Used to be referred to be TVTropes as Shlubb and Klump English. They changed the name to be a bit less esoteric, which has an irony all its own.

ttyymmnn > Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull
05/02/2014 at 18:10

Fascinating. And now that you've expanded on your hypothesis, I think you may well be on to something.

I have no idea how I learned to read (that was a LONG time ago), but I do know that I never put much stock in phonics, and didn't teach my kids to read that way. I have no idea what they did in school, but my boys learned to read by our reading whole words to them.

But your idea that putting an -s on a word as "ruining" it, if I paraphrase correctly, has a lot of traction. Using the apostrophe does not alter the base word. It's weird, but it makes sense.

Thank you for one of the most stimulating intellectual conversations I've ever had here!

Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 18:34

"ruining" the word is exactly correct as a paraphrase - if you're learning a common noun, you tend to run into its plural at a fairly high rate, proper nouns not so much. You're also more likely to learn proper nouns/brands at a later time than common ones, which plays into this.

I'll confess to not coming up with all this on the fly, as I've mused lightly on it in the past. It's more that I had the notes in my back pocket - I'm just glad somebody thinks my notes aren't completely stupid, as I hadn't exposed them to any deeper probing.

BJ > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 19:10

Bob the Angry Flower agrees with you.

Kinja'd!!!

Link to original

66671 - 200 [METRIC] my dash > BJ
05/02/2014 at 20:26

Is that flower from Crazed Clay's profile pic? (Also: correct use of the apostrophe!)

BJ > 66671 - 200 [METRIC] my dash
05/02/2014 at 20:50

Yes, it is the same flower. Here's another classic:

http://www.angryflower.com/296.html

Agrajag > ttyymmnn
05/02/2014 at 22:15

I witnessed someone using a comma to make a contraction today.