Comment

Comment by infosynth on June 20, 2010 at 9:12am

The practice of omitting the apostrophe applies to plural forms of abbreviations and acronyms, such as CDs, and URLs (pronounced "earl").

Simply adding an s is the most common way to create the the plural form in English, so all the extra apostrophes never made sense to me.

Comment by Garrett W. on June 20, 2010 at 12:11am

It's also not a contraction, which is why I don't use apostrophes on years.

Comment by infosynth on June 19, 2010 at 12:07pm

More about apostrophes...

Someone wrote about disliking the form "80's" to refer to the decade.

In such cases, both forms may be correct depending upon what is specified in the style manual. "1980s" and "1980's" both may be correct. In the past, "80's" was the preferred usage. Now, however, "80s" is generally preferred. Again, it depends upon what is specified in the style manual.

Note that this apostrophe is not the same as the one used to indicate the possessive form of a noun.

Comment by infosynth on June 19, 2010 at 11:47am

Wow, this group isn't very active...

How about a few grammar/usage pet peeves to get the conversation rolling again?

In no particular order:

1. "impact" to mean "affect" "That decision impacts my bottom line." (Wow, that must hurt!) My wisdom teeth were impacted. The meteor impacted the moon (and became a meteorite).

2. "they" to refer to a singular noun, e.g., "The user needs help. Their computer is broken."

3. Misuse of "affect" vs. "effect." "He has quite an affect." [Not a compliment!]

4. Receiving email notes written in "text." "You" is not spelled "u."

5. "It's" vs. "its" and other apostrophe abuse.

Does anyone else have any favorites?

Comment by Nicholas Thomas Wright on October 5, 2009 at 6:27pm

I take great pains to write specifically what I want to say.
So when I see others who confuse half their audience by not caring if they've delivered what they want to say, it's incredibly annoying to me.

Comment by Garrett W. on July 13, 2009 at 11:13am

haha nice story. although i would argue that the men's interpretation is the more correct, meaning aside.

Comment by Sir Spiffy on July 13, 2009 at 10:20am

I have a story similar to Johannes'.

On the first day of class, the English professor wrote a sentence and told the class to put in the missing punctuation. Here's what the sentence said:

A woman without her man is nothing.

All the men in the class wrote this:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.

All the women in the class wrote this:

A woman: Without her, man is nothing.

Comment by 3Milya on July 13, 2009 at 5:59am

Shtanto, I agree with you. Even though I'm Finnish and I am sure that I make some mistakes too.

It's understandable if you're a foreigner talking another language, but it really annoys me if someone misuses their native language.
Overuse of abbreviations is also irritating when it makes reading and understanding of the language hard or even impossible.

Comment by JS on June 11, 2009 at 1:37pm

I'm going to tell you a story about grammar and how that may affect life and death.


(This is a loose translation of what my language teacher told us in class, a long time ago, so it MIGHT have some mistakes or grammar errors, talk about irony...)



Once upon a time, there was a king, who had his notes written for him.
He decided life and death. Literally.

His writer, though, didn't know where to put commas.

The king wanted the person to be killed, so he said: "Kill him, not keep him alive."

The writer, however, wrote "Kill him not, keep him alive."

So, the prisoner, who was to be executed, was then released and kept alive.

Comment by Shtanto on June 11, 2009 at 1:25pm

I wish we could fix mistakes on the forums and in blog posts.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• …
• 5
• Next ›
• Page