I spend a lot of effort restraining myself from jumping into conversations or marking up emails and being the grammar police. Bad grammar drives me crazy, but apparently it does not drive other people nearly as insane. However, the vast proliferation of apostrophes in places where they do not belong is about to push me over the edge.
You see, when it comes to pluralizing something (that is, taking one and making it more than one), English is a very, very, very simple language. You just add the letter s. If the word ends in the letter s, you just add es. Does no one remember this from their grammar school years? I have one cat, now I have two cats. How many shoes do I need for a pair? Two shoes. I have four chairs in my kitchen. There are three wine glasses on the table. It is winter, one of the four seasons, and there are clouds in the sky. Earth is one of eight planets in the solar system.
That was easy, right? Just to show you how easy it is, I wrote this entire post without a single apostrophe, and there are plural words all over the place. If I can do it, you can do it. So get out there and start practicing proper use of the apostrophe!
But what about when something plural possesses something? What then? ;)
ReplyDeleteIf anyone or any group is possessing anything, then be my guest and use an apostrophe! (Unless it is possessing something, in which case, please don't). And apparently, if a word ends in and 's' and is possessing something, you're supposed to add an apostrophe AND and 's'. I don't like it, but that's the way it is.
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