Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English and other popular language books: "If you love language and the unvarnished truth, you'll love Everything You Know About English Is Wrong."
FeatureBook.com: "A good counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s anxiety-inducing Eats, Shoots & Leaves."
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One More Wrong Assumption About Our Dynamic Language:
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong is about the BS (and in this case, B'S) often associated with grammar "rule's," word "origin's," famous "real" quote's, and other common "knowledge" you can put into "quote mark's." This sample chats about manic apostrophe injection:
Plural’s
You do not use an apostrophe when forming plurals.
Just last evening I spotted a news story, posted on the web by a major news organization, describing a disturbance during a protest march: “Amid the cries and chaos, photographers were kicked, their camera’s tossed.” After seeing that sentence, my cookie’s were nearly tossed.
Now, apostrophizing the word cameras was obviously the result of typing error and subsequent editing error (or, perhaps, of pure I-don’t-give-a-damn), and not ignorance of the language. Otherwise, both writer and editor would have standardized the sentence to refer to cry’s (or maybe even crie’s) and photographer’s, and, heck, why not refer to chao’s as a plural of a single instance of chao?
I suggest that lackadaisical overuse of the apostrophe is fueled by an abundance of initialisms these days, as writers try to mind their P’s and Q’s. (No one is quite sure why we don’t watch, say, our J’s and X’s, but that’s another story.) In the case of this hoary phrase, Minding your Ps and Qs (or, worse yet, your ps and qs) is potentially confusing, especially if doing so involves crossing your ts and dotting your is. Dotting I’s is clearer than is dotting Is. But now everything seems to be reduced to initialisms: IMHO, TYVM, and following the pattern of crossing your P’s and dotting your Q’s, people regularly write of visiting MD’s and listening to DJ’s in the 1990’s. Here, the apostrophe is supposedly and erroneously a “clarifier.” But MD (and even its period-sprinkled variation M.D.) is a word in and of itself, so to make it plural, add S. We visit MDs. Better yet, use the actual phrase.
The same thinking applies to dates. We correctly refer to the 1990s and not the 1990’s—and it gets especially confusing with dates when using an apostrophe to indicate contraction: We should refer to the ’90s, not the 90’s (and certainly not the ’90’s—one apostrophe to a customer, please!).
And now, returning to our cries and chaos, in case you were curious, the new’s organization that reported the major breaking story of tossing cameras
was . . . CB’S.
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