I am subscribed to various different RSS feeds, many of which are 'word of the day' of some dictionary or whatever.
I would really like to put those feeds up on my blog, but don't know much about HTML. I guess I'll need some HTML to do that.
One of my pet hates is the incorrect usage of the apostrophe in the english language.
I saw a billboard in Cape Town last year:
--- Overtake the Jones'
Now, that is wrong.
The apostrophe in English is used only to:
a) denote possession and to
b) show an omission of a letter.
That sentence should be:
Overtake the Joneses
I know it looks funny, but it is right.
How about this one.
The princess' dress is beautiful.
Again wrong ... If singular, it takes " 's ", and it does not matter how many s-es there are already... (whoa that is a difficult one, how does one spell the plural of "S" IMO you would *not* use an apostrophy, an apostrophy is not used for plural forms)
So it should be:
The princess's dress is beautiful.
Now:
The Princesses' dresses are beautiful.
That is correct, it is plural, now because there is an S, the apostrophe is not followed by an additional s.
However words where the plural does not end on an S, do get the 's. Like :
The mice's cheese.
Lastly, the usage of "then" when "than" is meant.
From a magic card: (frazzled editor)
So, the picture is not quite as clear as I hoped, but it is still one of my favourite magic cards from the unhinged set. (will make a post about that later)
6 comments:
Erm... I am not sure how to embed it in your HTML, but the actual link can be seen by clicking settings, and then Web Clips.
Quick search reveals that the site must be XML enabled (which all blogs are). Next you need to code it.
Here's the Wikipedia's example.
(Note my use of apostophes (what is the plural?!)
Hmmm, I might have some java script lying around that can do that with some tweaking... maybe.
Oh, and you might like to take a look at Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss. It's an excellent book for defenders of good grammar and punctuation.
I have read the first few chapters... It was lying around in a friend's house. It was really funny. And insightful.
It turns out I was wrong... There is a third usage of an apostrophe in english.
The plural of letters or numbers or abbreviations.
so s's, is right.
And apostrophes is the right plural of apostrophe.
That is something that used to drive me mad at the store where I worked, seeing that the people who wrote the sale signs had put up things like...
"Nacho's : 99 cents"
...they weren't capable enough to manage that, yet they were better paid than I was.
Spook, you see in Afrikaans, which is another language in South Africa (one of 11 official ones), the apostrophe is used in words ending on an accented vowel.
Like Nacho's, foto's (photos) etc. would be correct in Afrikaans. So I know where we get it from, but the USA... It probably comes from the top.
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