My business hasn’t accepted checks in years, but when we did we’d get people miswriting the “To” part all the time, going so far as to accidentally write a competitor’s name. They were all deposited as written and cleared fine.
Or Borreliosis, for the causative agent.
I believe you mean
which is often incorrectly and ungrammatically shortened to “Kroger’s”.
Which is the nub of my mild contention vs @oldoaktree.
Stores are properly named whatever it says on the sign. You’re not going to (rightly) call a Home Depot “Home Depot’s” as in “I’m going to Home Depot’s”.
People who say “Kroger’s” are not asserting they’re referring to the store owned by the Kroger Company. Which is the owner’s full name. To do that grammatically correctly they’d have to say “I’m going to the Kroger Company’s store” What they are doing, is wrongly inserting “'s” into the trade name of the store. Which name is “Kroger” with no s.
As always, there is an element of the descriptivist / prescriptivist argument here.
Is it wrong if 5% of the populace does it? If 25%? If 60%?
Is it dialect if 70% of the populace does it on one region and 2% do it in the rest of the country? C.f. “It needs washed.”
Or is it simply ignorant error in every case?
I vote Door #3. Other’s mileage may vary.
I have a couple of tangential comparisons to offer.
The readers of the Shannara novels of Terry Brooks commonly pronounced the eponymous lands with an emphasis thus: sha-NAR-ra. But the author himself intended it for it to be pronounced as: SHAN-a-ra. I saw a video of him doing so as recently as 15 years ago. But he now has bowed to popular pressure, and says it as his fans do.
Here is a sign for a McDonald’s in Australia. The company itself accepted the popular nickname that Aussies apply to their business and officially label some of their stores with it.
Whether or not it’s historically right, if enough people say it a different way even an established trademark can succumb to pressure.
Lego.
Americans, and it’s always Americans, insist on saying “Legos”.
It’s singular and plural. “Legos” is never correct.
If it’s the Smith’s mailbox, where do the other Smiths who live there get their mail?
Here in America, we call it by its correct name: Mickey D’s.
Now, where’s that “Entirely Benign, Appropriate Things That Make You Seethe” thread again…?
Not so fast!
When people say “I am going to Kroger’s” the Kroger “Corporation owned store” is implied.
“I am going to the hardware store”. Which one you ask? “Bob’s” (locally owned hardware store} is implied.
“Bob’s didn’t have the part I need. I am going to Home Depot”
Home depot is a brand name for a big box hardware store and there is no need to imply that the Home Depot Incorporated owns that particular hardware store.
Properly it’s “THE Home Depot.”
Why is one acceptable to you and the other not when they are exactly the same? Both are one particular outlet of a massive nationwide chain of corporate-owned stores.
What do you think about eating at Pizza Hut’s or Taco Bell’s? That’s a trick question because neither chain is owned by a corporation of the same name. They’re owned (right now; stuff changes) by Yum Brands. So to do the possessive thing accurately, albeit still grammatically wrong, you’d have to say “I’m going to Yum Brands’” (note apostrophe on end) or “I’m going to Yum Brands’s” depending on whose style manual you prefer.
Regardless of style you’ve set yourself up for having to answer the next question: “Pizza, tacos, or one of the other chains they own”?
I vote: Does it really impair understanding or are we just being pedantic about a often misunderstood rule?
Look, it is great if you follow the rules as you understand them. But getting angry and calling people “ignorant” if they either do not really care or if they understand them differently is not helping.
I personally do not care. That does not mean I am ignorant, just that it doesn’t matter to me if I write 1980s or 1980’s. No one misunderstands that, unless willfully and blindly.
Remember, there are no “rules” for English. There are a few privately produced guides, which do not always agree.
In fact, afaik, not a single pundit here has explained the 'rules" correctly. It should be "According to XXXX guide the rule is… "
Because language is fluid.
Bob owns a hardware store. It is Bob’s Hardware store. I am going to Bob’s to get some nails.
Home Depot is not a person. Bob is a person. McDonald is a person (brothers). These people owned businesses. Maybe Bob, the McDonald brothers, or whoever no longer are involved.
It is not incorrect to say Bob’s or McDonald’s.
In my variant of English, at any rate, we have the same usage for non-business premises. “I’ll be at Helen’s” means “I will be at Helen’s house”. I honestly can’t imagine that anyone would ever fail to understand this usage, and it’s certainly not regarded as incorrect. Informal, maybe, but not incorrect.
Is this usage not found in US English?
Sonic is a fast food chain. You hear some people say “Sonics.” There’s a Sonic store here near a street called Airway. You hear the same people call the street “Airways.”
Wrong. In Maryland it says “Driver’s License” on the actual license. Maybe your state calls it something else. You don’t get to say what other states should call it.
It certainly is found in US English exactly as you describe.
The whole issue here is applying that to businesses, and people mistakenly believing therefore that the 's is part of the official business name when it isn’t.
There’s actually three separate concepts here:
How we refer to the premises — “Helen’s” for Helen’s house; “Kroger’s” for Kroger’s store.
The name of the owner or occupier - Helen, The Kroger Co.
The name of the enterprise being carried on by the owner/occupier at the premises. In Helen’s case, her activity of living, socialising, etc at her home doesn’t require a distinctive name. In Kroger’s case, The Kroger Co. will have registered one or (probably) more brands, trademarks, business names, etc under which it carries on business, plus a business may have unregistered but nevertheless widely used and recognised names — “Macca’s” is now a registered mark of McD Asia Pacific LLC, which they license to franchisees who run businesses under that name, but they only registered it because they observed it to be widely used.
The error is to think that an enterprise must have one, and only one, “proper” name. Businesses can and commonly do have multiple names, used with varying degrees of formality.
One that has bothered me for a long time is the Go-Go’s. I guess it’s “correct” because that’s how the band spells it, but what purpose does the apostrophe serve? Likewise, why are there apostrophes in numerical decades like the 1960’s? The apostrophe in ‘60s makes sense but not in 1960’s or something weird like ‘60’s.
I think The La’s had the same deal.
I stopped using apostrophes for both decades and acronyms (e.g. CDs) after being taught not to some time ago.