I seem to recall that grammar threads get rather heated, but let’s try to keep it civil, folks.
In my short time on the planet, I have noticed a large increase in the incorrect use of the apostrophe. I’m not talking about “its” vs. “it’s” so much, as I’m sure even someone who has mastered that rule can admit it is a bit confusing. I mean the use of apostrophes to pluralize a word, as in “car’s” or “monkey’s” when it is not used to indicate possession. And I want to know why.
An example: It’s back.
Does that mean, that thing has returned? Or does it refer to the dorsal side of an indeterminate animal? With the misuse of apostrophes, it’s hard to tell. (OK, I’m stretching here, but it’s something I find annoying)
First, is my assumption correct? When I was 12 I almost never saw it in formal writing (newspapers, advertising, etc), when I was 20 it was something I saw occasionally, and now it seems widespread.
Next, why did this happen? I was inspired to write this by a thread in which someone corrects the spelling of “IQ’s” by saying that it doesn’t take an apostrophe. Call me crazy, but I remember my middle school English book advising one to use an apostrophe to pluralize a letter or number, as in “I got three A’s this semester.” Now I hesitate to use that spelling because it seems to encourage the overuse of apostrophes. Could this have something to do with it?
I dunno, I’m a grammar Nazi for sure. To me, communication is extremely important, and the silly grammar rules we learned in school help us communicate more clearly and effectively. YMMV, of course.
It seems that errors proliferate simply by their existence - we see them and we repeat them. In fact, I’ve had to correct myself from using ‘loose’ instead of ‘lose’ and confusing ‘accept’ and ‘except’ simply because I see the errors so often. It seems to me that we learn to spell by recalling what we’ve read so if we keep reading apostrophe-challenged words, we pick up the mistakes unless we watch ourselves. You know how you have to write down a word to check if it ‘looks right’ when someone asks you to spell it?
I think the rules about apostrophes also confused the heck out of a lot of people, who never managed to unconfuse themselves.
FWIW, I’ve never used apostrophes to pluralize numbers or acronyms. I’ve been taught that apostrophes are for contractions (such as “I’ve”), and possessives. Some confusion I’m sure arises from the position of the apostrophe on possessives, where the apostrophe-S is appended to the end fo the word unless it is plural already, wherein you simply tack an apostrophe on the end and eliminate the final S. Also, the pronoun “it” throws a bit of a monkey wrench into the works because the possessive form does not use an apostrophe due to the confusion between that and the contraction for “it is.” Not only to a lot of people tend to use an apostrophe for this pronoun, many also apply this incorrectly to other pronouns. (Your’s, Our’s, Their’s)
Any other use that is not foreign in nature (“B’nai Brith,” “Hawai’i”) are traditionally incorrect.
I’m not sure if it is really any more prevalent now than 20 or 30 years ago. The advent and popularization first of bulletin board systems, and then of the internet at large, have merely given us many more visible examples of apostrophe abuse (among other grammar mistakes.) I think it’s merely a product of poorly learned grammar given a much wider audience; it always existed to one degree or another, but we have only been able to see so many examples of other random people’s usage in recent years. Additionally, as Quiddity pointed out, being online bring one into contact with many others who make the same mistakes, and so it becomes self-perpetuating. Many people aren’t conscious that they are making mistakes – or if they are don’t particularly care, so they tend not to pay a whole lot of attention to the way other people use grammar, thus the habit becomes all the more ingrained.
To indicate elisions, as in contractions (cannot > can’t, I shall > I’ll)
To mark the possessive of nouns.
For the “partitive genitive” – an odd construction but quite common in English: “a painting of Churchill’s”, “that field of Smith’s” – where what’s being pointed out is one from among a group. The “of” handles the partitive element; the apostrophe handles the possession aspect. “A painting of Churchill’s” is “one painting from among the oeuvre of works painted by Churchill” as opposed to “a painting of Churchill” which would be a portrait for which he sat.
The plural of things referenced as themselves, largely but not always letters and numbers. “The is’s in II Timothy 3:16 in the King James Version are italicized, indicating they’ve been supplied by the translators for clarity.” “That semester I got four A’s and a B.” “Europeans in handwriting often place a crossbar on their 7’s and Z’s, to distinguish them from 1’s and 2’s.” The modern tendency is to merely add the -s without an apostophe unless lack of clarity would result. (Does “Is” mean more than one I or the present singular of “to be”? Does “Ms.” at the end of the sentence mean the generic form of address for a woman, the abbreviation of “manuscript,” or more than one M?)
Do note that anything self-referential formerly (and sometimes still) takes the -'s pluralization. “Most antidisestablishmentarianism’s in text have reference to its fame as the supposed longest word, not to discussions of the status of the Welsh Church which gave rise to the word’s coinage.”
I nominate spell checkers. People are lazy now – if there isn’t a red line beneath the word, it’s A-OK :rolleyes:
Since there are few grammar checkers out there (and fewer that do anything like a good job), mistakes like loose vs. lose, it’s vs. its etc… just don’t get caught – no red line under the word, you see…
You’re just noticing this? There must be eighty-leven zillion threads on this on the Dope alone, and a google times that number overall. There are whole books on the subject. It’s been worsening for years, if not decades. And it will continue to get worse. No known force can stop it.
To name just one example, misuse of apostrophes appears frequently in Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics, going back eight decades and more. And it’s not just his fractured use of the language, either.
Nothing is a good thread to recommend that. Not only is it filled with misinformation (I found a gross error in the first page I read*), but it is useless as a guide to anything, since you can’t find any of her “rules” without reading each chapter over. And many of the “rules” she mentions have never appeared except in Lynn Truss’s imagination.
It’s basically an Old Fart whining that kids don’t have respect these days – and stay off my lawn!
The most common misuse seems to me to be in plurals of words that end in a vowel. Lots of people seem to think that, say, “pizzas” is wrong, and somehow ought to be “pizza’s”. I think the vowel thing is key, as you’ll see lists like: “Burgers, Chips, Pizza’s” or “Video’s and Televisions”, with only the word ending in a vowel taking an apostrophe.
Using 's for plurals involving initials (A’s, IQ’s) is normal, but using 's for regular words is just plain wrong.
A local business calls itself House of Trophy’s. I guess they thought that if they spelled it Trophies, no one would know what they were talking about. . . .
My contribution to the apostrophe debate is to use them when you’re pluralizing letters because to omit it would cause confusion. “I got four As on my report card” sounds like the word “as” rather than the plural of A. So, “I got four A’s on my report card and two B’s.”
Though of course many letter grades are the result of bs.
Actually, you see this sort of thing a lot with words that end in a “y”. I don’t think it’s deliberate, I think it’s just a case of people forgetting that the -y ending becomes -ies in the plural. So the writer puts down “House of Trophys” and then thinks, “Hmm, that ‘ys’ looks all wrong to me. How can we fix that? I know – one of those tadpole marks!”
Many companies have abandoned the possessive apostrophe in their names (Barclays Bank, Harrods).
Since one use of an apostrophe is to indicate that something has been omitted (*it’s * for it is, for instance), I think that these companies should put an apostrophe in their names to indicate that the first apostrophe has been left out.
Oddly enough, putting an apostrophe in the plural of a word that ends in a vowel is correct usage—in Dutch.
I can’t imagine that the Dutch language has sufficient impact on English to have caused this trend. But perhaps the same mysterious force is at work in both situations (i.e., Dutch speakers adopting the “vowel-apostrophe-s” plurals as formally correct usage, and English speakers preferring “vowel-apostrophe-s” plurals even though they’re formally incorrect).
As has been noted on these boards before, the English have an odd habit of sticking an s on the end of any company name. I know someone who worked for what used to be the law firm Sidley & Austin. Here in the United States, we might shorten that to “Sidley.” (“I’ve been at Sidley since 1998.”) But he always said “Sidleys.” Strange.
