A dollar's worth of punctuation advice needed!

In My Humble Opinion
1

Okay, I feel like I’m losing my marbles. This should be an easy question. And yet…

When writing the following sentence, I know an apostrophe is needed:

"I’d like five dollars’ worth of gumballs, please."

All well and good. (Except for the buyer’s teeth–that’s a helluva lot of gumballs!) But what happens when the sentence doesn’t use the spelled-out form of the word, but instead the numbers?

"The architect recommended $180,000 worth of improvements."

Or:

"The architect recommended $180,000’s worth of improvements."

My inclination is toward the second, because the phrase is possessive. But… dagnabit, it looks wrong. It makes me feel like someone who incorrectly thinks an apostrophe is needed when talking about dates (“I went to college in the mid-1990’s” – ugh!).

Maybe I’ve just been proofing too many numbers today and nothing looks right anymore. Can someone who isn’t burned out please confirm my instincts (or tell me I’m wrong, perish the thought)?

2

Reported myself for being an idiot & posting in the wrong forum. I never do this. Now I know I’m burned out!

3

(1) Any question about apostrophes will inevitably lead to a great debate :slight_smile:
(2) I’d prefer to see “$180,000 worth” in writing, since it looks neater.
(3) If you are going to be completely pedantic, since “$180,000” is pronounced as “one hundred (and) eighty thousand dollars”, you could write “$180,000’ worth” – but that looks so strange I’d never seriously suggest it.

4

Heh, true, nothing inspires a good debate like an apostrophe.

And both points #2 and #3 explain my conundrum. Omitting the apostrophe certainly looks better, no doubt about it. But I know the phrase/term/whatever is possessive, and thus, the more I look at it without the apostrophe, every sense revolts.

Hence my pickle. :slight_smile:

5

Maybe you’ll sleep better if you see it this way:

The character “$” already has multiple readings based on context: it can be read as dollar or dollars depending on whether the value that follows is 1 or not.

So if the convention is not to write the apostrophe in the examples where we use “$” and a number, we can just say that that’s because the symbol can also mean dollar’s or dollars’ depending on context.

6

Actually, any question about any kind of punctuation, spelling, usage, grammar, or idiom is going to lead to a great debate, sometimes getting downright nasty and descending to the equivalent of virtual fisticuffs, as we’ve seen occasionally arise from what might seem, to a normal sane person, to be a perfectly innocent question in GQ! :smiley:

Having engaged in a few of these myself, I have come to be known as a fairly hard-core prescriptivist, a term which I assure you that some of my worthy opponents, they of a free-thinking and descriptivist mindset, do not consider a compliment! :wink:

Consider it significant, then, that even I would object to the numeric form being festooned with an apostrophe. It just totally doesn’t work, and Mijin probably has about as good a rationalization as any, though it’s kind of a moot point since few things in the English language are ever consistent so it’s pretty futile to pretend that they should be. If it really bothers you, you can always get rid of the somewhat inelegant possessive form altogether: “the architect recommended improvements totaling $180,000” or something to that effect. But in the original form, nope, no apostrophe.

7

I’d just say “$180,000 in improvements” and bypass the issue.

8

It’s my practice to disagree with everybody about punctuation, Mijin, but as the goals are to present an attractive appearance and to help choie sleep, that bit of self-delusion works as well as anything. :wink:

No, really, it makes enough sense that I can also sleep. Something I love about the SDMB is that I am not alone in being able to lose sleep over an apostrophe. Or a planned post. Or something else only oddballs would obsess over.

9

That’s way too many gumballs. Tell the guy you want one dollar’s worth, and if you feel you must, go back and tell him, “The piñata was bigger on the inside than I expected. Here are four more dollars. Give me however many gumballs that will buy.”

10

I’m not sure you need the apostrophe. “Five dollars worth” could be thought of as a compound noun, and not a noun with a possessive modifier. “Pennyworth,” is, after all, a single word without even a space or a hyphen. I realize that means you should probably say “a dollar worth,” and not “a dollars worth,” but I can deal with “a dollars worth” as a fixed expression that grew out of a need for consistency, or parallelism, or something.

If it makes you feel better to write “five dollars-worth,” or “$180,000-worth,” I wouldn’t red pencil it. I wouldn’t write it myself, though.

Think about how you emphasize it. On the word “dollars,” probably, which is how you’d say it if it were a compound noun.

If you wanted to buy something odd, like “a troy ounce” of gum, it’s written like that, it’s not “troy’s ounce.” I think “dollars worth” may be that kind of noun.

And, FWIW, I once bought $20 worth of American gum, about half of which was different kinds of bubble gum, at the request of family in Czechoslovakia, because they didn’t have gum there, really. They had sugary chicle products, but they were barely fit for human consumption, and American gum was the gold standard. They wanted to have it for a party or a wedding, or something. This was in the 80s, and it was a lot of gum. They used to put us up when we visited the old country, and we always brought gifts, but it never felt like enough, because they treated us like royalty, so when they very occasionally made small requests like this, we were more than happy to oblige.

11

Thanks for the answers so far, guys!

Hm, I wish this hadn’t been moved to IMHO – this is a punctuation question, not a poll; I’m pretty sure there is a factual answer to it.

RivkahChaya, thanks! Actually the phrase “Get a ___'s worth of ___” definitely requires an apostrophe–and I shouldn’t really have said possessive; it’s genitive, although the intent is similar. There’s an unspoken “of” in there.

Here, found an explanation:

Here’s a good explanation of the usage.

But anyway I think those advocating leaving the apostrophe out because of the “$” symbol are correct. It is neater, and one can assume that the symbol includes all the varieties of the word “dollar” that are implied by it.

I can live with that logic. And, indeed, sleep. :smiley: Thank you very much!

Edited to add: OMG, just as I was closing up shop I found this, from the good ol’ New York Times Manual of Style, bolding mine:

Whew! If it’s good enough for the Times that counts as a good explanation if anyone on my client’s reading list complains.

12

nm

13

I coincidentally just came across this, in a book by the British journalist and food critic Jay Rayner:
There are vases by Lalique and an outside “garden” that isn’t outside at all, but that takes $8,000’ worth of plants a month to maintain.
Apparently uncertain of what to do, Jay steers an intermediate course between no punctuated flourishes at all and a full apostrophe-s, namely just a single unadorned apostrophe with no following “s”. The rationale seems to be that if “$8000’s worth” looks way wrong, and maybe “$8000 worth” isn’t quite right either, then why not compromise? :smiley:

So apparently this is a common problem. Jay could have used the New York Times manual of style!

P.S.- Jay is a pretty funny guy and a good writer, and the book “The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner” is a great read, though unfortunately – as Jay sternly warns in the preface – it’s impossible to read without getting hungry. :slight_smile:

14

Ha! :smiley: That is funny, and coincidental. You realize, of course, that we’re now destined to spot this issue everywhere now that we’ve discussed it, despite not having noticed it before.

Oy, UK punctuation is a horse of a different [del]color[/del] colour. Which makes it difficult when editing a document written by an (American) bank that prefers to use UK English for its European customers. Fewer commas, single quotes rather than double, [del]periods[/del] full stops/commas outside quotes, no full stop after titles (e.g. ‘Mr’)… and that’s disregarding all the non-punctuation issues.

Anyway, I do thank you all for your help. I’ll be very glad to put this project behind me. Charts and numbers are the most aggravating things to proof, I find. (Especially since I frequently have to double-check their calculations, too. Did I mention this is a bank?)

15

Not necessarily. In some cases, the only right answer is, “Whatever it says in the style guide that you are following.” Consider Oxford comma usage, or British vs. American use of quotation marks or periods on terms like “Mr.” and “Mrs.”

As for me, I’d go with, “The architect recommended improvements that cost $180,000.”

16

I was going to post that I like “$180,000-worth of improvements”. Then I saw it written down, and decided I didn’t like it after all. But it is another option if you feel you must have a punctuation mark in there. I prefer it without.

17

Here’s the most factual answer:

  1. You are writing this sentence to communicate with human beings, not a computer;
  2. Human’s are flexible and smart enough that following precise rules is not necessary, so your goal is not following an inflexible rule, but rather making things as easy as possible for humans to understand;
  3. Except for a few apostrophe-obsessed nerds, the vast majority of human beings will understand the first (no apostrophe) version simply and quickly, but will stop on the second one (however momentarily) puzzling out what the apostrophe is doing;
  4. Therefore the first version is better.

You might possibly disagree with 2, as a value judgment about the goal of writing, but 3 is empirically provable (even though to date it hasn’t been, I am very confident it is true).

Of course, where there is a style guide that addresses this, that is definitive (Choie points out the NYT ruling). And Bryan Elkers has a better solution altogether (because his version is even easier for humans to understand).

18

The apostrophe is technically correct but it appears wrong to so many people that I would rewrite the sentence to eliminate it.

19

You’re playing with fire, here.

20

And, in doing so, he stumbled on something so strange that it’s definitely wrong. We don’t use the apostrophe for possessives without an s. I remember one guide that said that “Candice’” was acceptable, but I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time.

To be honesty, I hear the ___'s worth as a single word, as if it were ___'s-worth. I could actually see someone writing “$1000-worth of candy” at some point in the future.

It’s not every day I get my ignorance fought on grammar.