Monday, August 29, 2005

Apostophe Blues

Some people don't seem to know what to do with my name. Not when I own something, anyway.
My first name is James. If you're talking about my spleen, you say "James's spleen." Some people leave off the s when they write it. They write James' spleen. But they'll say James's.
Only with names like Moses, Socrates, and Jesus do you get to leave the s off the possessive. Any other word that ends in s gets and apostrophe plus s. So it's the princess's kiss, the waitress's attitude, the bus's brakes, and Mr. Jones's bus.

I'd bet these folks are related to the people who add an apostrophe when making things plural. You see signs saying "Puppy's for sale" or "Fresh Tomatoe's". I don't know why people use apostrophe's to make words plural. I think people are afraid of being wrong so they freeze up and get it wrong anyway.

And don't get me started on misused quotation marks.
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1 comment:

Erinna said...

I just blogged about this last week. See for yourself:

http://eringoblog.net/?p=870

Friday, September 08, 2006 6:38:00 PM

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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"