Outrage!

[ladyofastolat]

A birthday card was just passed around at work for us all to sign. It included a rogue apostrophe! This was in the proper printed greeting! You kind of expect these thing's in handwritten sign's in greengrocers shop's or special's board's in pub's, and we all make slip's of the pen every now and then, but a proper published greeting's card? Outrage! Outrage! What i's the world coming to? et'c e'tc.

It's not even a funny mistake. Rogue inverted commas can be. ("Fresh" chicken soup). Confusion over similar words can be. ("The meat is complimented by the sauce." "Beware the deadly rouge gorilla fighters" etc.) This was just annoying. I am sorry to say that I had to discreetly cross it out before I could sign the card.

Comments

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Presumably on the same grounds that it is acceptable to form plurals of numbers and letters generally with apostrophes. The common example is "mind your p's and q's". As I say, personally I generally prefer formations such as CDs and 1970s, but as the alternatives with apostrophes are accepted in formal style manuals they can hardly be said to be wrong. And I definitely agree with King Pellinor that when writing in all-capitals, the apostrophe is very useful for clarity, and I would not hesitate to use it there. While the apostophe is commonly used either to indicate 'missing letters' or to form a possessive, there are acceptable cases where it may form a plural. Plurals of abbreviations (especially I assume initialisms and acronyms) is one case; also certain very short words may (although they don't have to) use apostrophes for plurals, such as "do's" - even the OED accepts these as valid options! Just because you (or I) prefer something doesn't necessarily mean it is the only right way.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

"mind your p's and q's" comes from "Pints and Quarts"; however, I'm not sure the exact context, whether it was multiple pints and multiple quarts, or things that belonged to the pints and to the quarts.

I would guess that "do's" is a throwback to post medieval times (thinks c16 / c17) where the grammar rules and spelling was somewhat more random.

What do you think of "C.D.s"?

[segh.livejournal.com]

I was always told it was short for "mind your pleases and thank-yous".

[segh.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I just found this on World Wide Words:
Investigations by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2007 when revising the entry turned up early examples of the use of Ps and Qs to mean learning the alphabet. The first is in a poem by Charles Churchill, published in 1763: “On all occasions next the chair / He stands for service of the Mayor, / And to instruct him how to use / His A’s and B’s, and P’s and Q’s.” The conclusion must be that this is the true origin.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

No, don't be ridiculous! Attempting to 'explain' "p's and q's" by reference to an imagined possessive is really reaching! (Anyway, the "pints and quarts" 'explanation' is not the only possibility - another is that it refers to typesetters' letters, where you have to be careful to pick the correct one, since of course they appear in reverse, and in a serif font can look very similar.) But "p's and q's" was merely a common example: the OED agrees that if I need to refer to multiple f's or g's (or 5's) I can use an apostrophe to do so.

I don't think anything of "C.D.s". CD is the generally accepted spelling, and I think C.D. thus looks unusual if not unnatural. As I keep saying, CDs is a perfectly good plural (as long as one has access to both upper and lower case letters) and I see no need to try to coin a new one; merely, I accept CD's as a valid alternative, even though I personally don't favour it. If writing in all-caps, C.D.S suffers the exact same problem as CDS, or perhaps even more so.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

And by the way, while I have been citing the OED recently, that is from my personal preference, but I acknowledge that it is not the only dictionary, nor the only style manual. (Indeed Oxford usage is out of step with much of the rest of British English usage over such matters as the spelling of "recognize" and similar words; I favour the Oxford usage since it echoes more closely the Greek root "-izein", but I, well, recognize that other British English users prefer the spelling "recognise".) As I say, one's personal preference does not a grammar rule make.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

"...one's personal preference does not a grammar rule make."

I'd say it does make a grammar rule, but that acceptance of the rule by other people is by no means guaranteed.

I do suffer from an internal conflict. On the one hand, I believe everyone has his own grammar and "English Grammar" is merely a description of a consensus; "ungrammatical" is therefore only relative, and as Bunn says the "ungrammatical" could be perfectly grammatical in another context or dialect. On the other hand, I get annoyed when people get things wrong :-D

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Mmn, that's getting pretty philosophical now. Can one person make a rule, without either being mandated to do so, or having other people validate the rule by accepting it?

I sympathise with your internal conflict!

"English Grammar" is merely a description of a consensus

This is very true, and one doesn't even need to go as far as talking about individual people's grammar(s) etc (though I think there is truth in that as well); there are a variety of 'correct' usages as demarcated in dictionaries and style manuals for a very wide range of spelling and grammar issues, such as placement of commas and punctuating inside or outside quotation marks and so on. Which, of course, has been my point all along.

I still feel people are WRONG! if they form the plural of "octopus" as anything other than "octopodes" (especially if they use "octopi") but I do admit that they are not necessarily 'wrong' by both dictionary and common-usage standards ;-)

(Reposted to correct bad html, sorry.)

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I'm exactly the same. I do agree with pretty much everything David Crystal says about how language evolves, and how everything we now think is "correct" was originally seen as a debased and "wrong" corruption of the "right" language.

But yet... But yet... *wails*