Oh good god, you’ve reminded me of something I’ve begun seeing in my transcripts lately. One of my writers uses apostrophes in colloquial contractions, such as gonna’, gotta’, wanna’, etc. I can understand why she would think that’s correct, but it makes me head hurt all the same.
And then there’s the ones who refuse to use apostrophes but still faithfully transcribe when folks drop their Gs or use 'em instead of them, so you have sentences like “Its still hard thinkin about em.” twitch
Why should it be a whoosh? I meant it as the possessive form of “it”. You undersood it as the possessive form, you understood it as referring to “each reference”, right?
Certainly there are guidelines and conventions, and one should follow them *as long as they add to understanding. * Once we get into arbitrary and confusing, then what is the purpose of the “rule”?
I castigate others for posting (on other boards, mind you) in ALL CAPS or with no Caps at the start of sentences or with no punctuation at all. I castigate them as their posts are thus hard to read or understand.
This is not to say that sometimes apostrophes are not often useful (and see, there I used a “double negative” which is another silly “rule”), they certainly can add to understanding. But does the apostrophe or lack thereof in “Oakland A’s” really help us understand the person is talking about the baseball team?
Does the difference between “an historic” or “a historic” add anything to understanding? Does an occassional possessive “it’s” hurt understanding?
And, “who vs whom”?!?:rolleyes: Here’s my rule for “who vs whom”: If you are playing (or are) a stereotypical English Butler, then use “whom”, otherwise don’t bother.
jjimm, I kiss you!
I have a t-shirt from Toothpaste for Dinner that is something akin to this comic:
I’ve often questioned the legitimacy of additional exclamation marks.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never found it’s/its confusing.
When you elide letters in a contraction, you add an apostrophe. It is contracts to it’s.
Pronouns do not use apostrophes except for proper nouns. His, hers, theirs, ours, its.
You don’t even need the second rule, really. It can be boiled down to “If ‘it is’ makes sense in the sentence, use it’s. If it doesn’t, use its.”
I suppose you might call the rules arbitrary, but I’ve never found them confusing, and I’m confused that people do.
I’ve always found it confusing, but I love the rule you showed above. “Pronouns do not use apostrophes except for proper nouns. His, hers, theirs, ours, its. That actually makes sense.”
As long as we’re on this rant, can we also include ever-increasing acceptance of using words in the wrong way? Every time I hear some dolt refer to their own or someone else’s vulva as a vagina I can’t help but think they’re a dumbass, yet there are plenty of people on this board who think it’s just hunky dory because lots of people have started to do it. A vagina is no more a vulva than a mouth is a face!
And then there’s “executive produced by”. Gah!
Both of these make me want to slash my chest and rub camel shit in my hair (Thanks Sampiro. :D) just for being stupid enough to read what these people have had to say.
I think the correction you’re looking for is: “Of course I would like some pie, thank,s,”, said Sally, crossing the room.
While for the most part it is a gaucherie if not a solecism to use an apostrophe in forming the plural, at one time, it was considered good usage to use the apostrophe in pluralizing a letter, number, typographical symbol, date, or word used as itself. “Roman numerals permitted as many as three X’s or C’s in a row.” “Two 8’s at the end of a username is sometimes a subtle indicator of Neonazi affiliations.” “?'s go within quotation marks when the quotation is a question, and outside when the sentence in which the quotation is incorporated is itself a question.” “That’s the way it’s going to be, no if’s, and’s or but’s.” By and large this has been dispensed with in modern usage, the sole exception being where the apostrophe-form plural becomes useful to avoid ambiguity. Consider the following:
“Scars, moles, wens, and pimples are usually considered blemishes marring a good complexion. As are the marks you will receive in your cosmetology training with our handy study guide.”
How much clearer would that be with “A’s are the marks”?!
But one must always allow for exceptions to one’s rules, mustn’t one?
I worked for years as a professional copy editor, always do well on tests meant to measure written language skills, and know damn well when to use an apostrophe. I still find myself occasionally typing it’s for its and vice versa. I’ve even been known to use a their when I mean they’re. I can spot the mistakes easily in someone else’s writing, but that doesn’t stop me from making them in my own. Because of this, when I do see an error or two, I won’t assume the person’s less intelligent or educated than me, I don’t throw it back in his or face, and I don’t disregard what she or he has to say because of what amounts to an insignificant typo.
When someone consistently and deliberately flouts standards of written English, however, that person is showing disregard for their readers, and I will come to disregard them accordingly.
I think one thing motivating the move away from apostrophes in plurals is that people have easier access to a variety of typefaces than they did back in the days of the manual typewriter, so I can now write, “As are the marks you will receive in your cosmetology training with our handy study guide.”
In any case, many style guides still allow for the use of an apostrophe when forming plurals of uppercase letters at the beginning of a sentence or lowercase letters anywhere in a sentence. “Mind your p’s and q’s,” “mind your Ps and Qs,” and “mind your ps and qs” are all acceptable.
Agreed.
It does not take a very large body of work to decide if the author generally understands guidelines or has no clue of their existence. Life is too short to turn an occasional idiosyncratic deviation, or typo, or calculated flouting into a triumph of pedantry for the corrector.
It is also too short to bother reading the butchered prose of the grammatically incompetent. And it’s not usually difficult to tell the difference.
Horseshit. There are some punctuation issues on which the rules are uncertain or disputed (for instance, concerning whether there should be an apostrophe in non-word plural forms like “A’s” or “1980s”), but that doesn’t mean that there are no rules about punctuation.
For instance, it is incorrect to write “it’s” for “its”, the way you did. That is a rule. If you enjoy violating it just to piss off the sticklers, like I said, nobody will do anything to you except point and laugh. But it makes you look ignorant of the basics of how to write English.
One should follow them because the very fact of their being universal conventions adds to understanding. Yes, it is confusing when you write “it’s” for “its”, because it’s incorrect punctuation. The literate reader who knows that “it’s” stands for “it is” initially tries to read your “it’s” as “it is”, and then has to correct it to “its” before s/he can understand your sentence.
Stop trying to second-guess standard conventions with your own tedious idiosyncratic conceits about what’s “arbitrary” and what “adds to understanding”. The world is full of arbitrary standard conventions that nobody needs your opinion on. For fuck’s sake, it’s arbitrary that in the US and Canada we drive on the right side of the road. The reason that the right-side-rule helps avoid misunderstandings and collisions is not that it’s intrinsically any more logical or less arbitrary than driving on the left side, but that it’s an arbitrary standard convention that everybody follows.
Save the exercise of your glorious intellectual individuality for situations where it can actually accomplish something useful. Meanwhile, when dealing with something as trivial as the placement of punctuation marks, just follow the fucking rules.
People who insist on applying their own individual analytical judgement to tinker with minor standard conventions of language usage always give the impression that that sort of thing is about all that their analytical judgement can cope with. If punctuation tweaking is your idea of meaningful intellectual self-expression, that’s just sad. (Unless you’re e. e. cummings, perhaps.)
The rule for who/whom is perfectly simple except when idiots try to pretend it’s complicated. The rule is that you use “who” wherever you’d use a subjective pronoun like “I”, “she”, “they” (that is, pronouns used for subjects of sentences or clauses), and “whom” wherever you’d use an objective pronoun like “me”, “her”, “them”.
Perfectly simple examples:
Who broke the window? She broke the window. (It’s the subject of the verb in the sentence so it requires the subjective form “who”.)
Whom shall I tell? I shall tell them. (It’s the object of the verb so it requres the objective form “whom”.)
“Whom” is gradually slipping out of use in modern English, so it’s generally considered correct to use “who” in place of “whom” (for instance, “Who shall I tell?” is okay, though I still prefer “whom” there).
But it is NOT correct to use “whom” in place of “who”, not ever, no matter what you think you’re playing. If you go around saying things like “Whom broke the window?”, you don’t sound like an English butler, you just sound like a slackjawed, illiterate, pants-pooping clod.
Whose “rule”? Strunk and White? The Chicago Manual of Style? AP? Fowler’s Modern English Usage? Oxford? Oxford’s Style manual is almost entirely usage/descriptive, whereas some of the others are proscriptive. Which of the six are “the rules”? Should one use a serial comma? AP sez no. Others say yes. Are you trying to tell me that all of those are exactly the same with the same rules? Of course they aren;t, so there are no rules.
No, it’s not arbitrary, it’s the Law, in each and every State, or at least the ones I know of. We have traffic LAWS, we have style guides. Can’t you see the difference?
Now you’re just clutching at straws. As I said, just because some of the rules are uncertain or disputed doesn’t mean that there are no rules at all.
Yes, as I said above: the punctuation rules aren’t legally enforced, while the traffic laws are. If you break a traffic law (and get caught), you’ll get fined or jailed. If you break a rule of written language usage, you’ll just get pointed and laughed at.
If you don’t mind that, hey, fine. But don’t come around trying to convince people who know the standard conventions of language usage better than you do that they shouldn’t be pointing and laughing at you, because “there are no rules”. That just makes you look even dumber.
Again, *Whose “rule”? Strunk and White? The Chicago Manual of Style? AP? Fowler’s Modern English Usage? Oxford? Which of the six are “the rules”? *
And "people who know the standard conventions of language usage better than you do" is funny coming from someone who clearly didn’t know the main style guides; nor know that Fowler’s Modern English Usage is for British English, not American. Which style guide do you follow? What are the differences? Or do you just remember what Mrs. Thistlebottom taught you in 5th grade English?:rolleyes:
Dude, all the standard style guides you mention, plus every other standard style guide to written English, agree that it is incorrect to write “it’s” for “its”. That’s a rule.
If it’s agreement between style guides that you’re demanding, there are plenty of things like that where all the style guides agree. Once more, just because some rules are disputed or uncertain doesn’t mean that there are no rules.
And yes, it is apparent that I know the standard conventions of language usage (for English, at least) better than you do. To take just two examples, I know the difference between “who” and “whom”, and I know that it’s incorrect to write “it’s” for “its”.
It’s a big jump from, “Some guides suggest using the serial comma and others don’t” to “There are no rules.”
No, it’s a consensus.
Here, let me help you with that hard word:
So, it’s not a rule if the guides disagree, but it is a rule if they do agree, eh?:dubious:
Obviously, I didn’t use “whom” incorrectly, I just used a smart-assed way of saying that using it often sounds affected. And, my use of “it’s” was to prove a point.
Of course, one can find dozens of typos and odd usages in my posts. For example, my use of “sez”, a slang term which I have an inordinate fondness for.
Because this seems to be an almost insurmountable logical conundrum for you, I’ll try to lend a hand. Most, if not all of the guides you mention will indicate when there are various points of view on a particular convention, such as the terminal comma or the encroaching use of “who” for “whom.” The majority of the grammatical and stylistic rules, however, will be consistent across each reference.
There are reasonable arguments to be made in the prescriptive vs. descriptive debate, but your idiotic “they ain’t all the same so there ain’t no rules!” affirmation is not one of them.