Candidates for the therapy of GRAMMARHOLICS (not so) ANONYMOUS … ? Virtual meetings are available regularly!
Be sure to visit our friends over at Apostrophe Abuse, Apostrophe Catastrophes, Apostrophism, and, of course, Apostrophe Police, …
Posted in General, GrammarGag Reel (fun stuff), PunctuationPerils, tagged @GrammarCops, comic, English, fun, grammar, Grammar Police, grammarian, language, punctuation, usage, words, writing on May 21, 2011| 1 Comment »
Candidates for the therapy of GRAMMARHOLICS (not so) ANONYMOUS … ? Virtual meetings are available regularly!
Be sure to visit our friends over at Apostrophe Abuse, Apostrophe Catastrophes, Apostrophism, and, of course, Apostrophe Police, …
Posted in General, GrammarGag Reel (fun stuff), GrammarGarnish (wordplay), GrammarGripes (pet peeves), tagged confusion, English, goof, grammar, language, noun, pet peeve, salads, sizzler, usage, verb, vocabulary, words, writing on May 21, 2011| 2 Comments »
Oh my … really? What is our language coming to?
See our series on Nouns gone bad:
Posted in General, GrammarGab (quotes), GrammarGoofs & Gaff(e)s, PunctuationPerils, SpellingSlipups, Tips, tagged @GrammarCops, apostrophe, confusion, correct, definition, dictionary, English, fun, goof, grammar, language, mistake, mom's, Mother's Day, non-apostrophe, pet peeve, punctuation, twitter, usage, vocabulary, words, writing on May 8, 2011| 1 Comment »
Say what?
We did a little research on apostrophe use in Mother’s Day and Father’s Day messages floating around cyberspace and …
Mom’s win!
By far, there were more mistake’s for Mother’s than there were foul up’s for Father’s … (of course, our apostrophe abuse is intentional here).
We thought you might get a chuckle at some of our findings, so, here you go:
Therefore, today’s punctuation concentration is on avoiding that embarassing apostrophe catastrophe …
To start, let’s define this little character:
apostrophe. noun. a mark of punctuation ( ‘ )used to indicate possessive case or omission of one or more letter(s) from a word.
You may see some sources state that the apostrophe is also used for indicating plurals of abbreviations, acronyms and symbols. We heartily disagree with this usage — we feel that this practice is outdated.
We do like Grammar Book’s baker’s dozen of Rules for Apostrophes, so we’ll refer you to their site for the full details and just give you a summary here, with one addition from us:
Our Apostrophe Rule:
0. Do not use an apostrophe to form a plural. This goes for words, symbols, abbreviations, and acronyms. * (This is related to Rules 5. – names, and 11. – CAPS & numbers used as nouns, below, but more encompassing.)
* Here are examples of misuse according to our rule:
Grammar Book’s Apostrophe Rules:
Speaking of rules … we like this … from Trevor Coultart:
Should be its.
Sources: GrammarBook.com, Flickr
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