Hi Janice:
You probably shouldn't get me started, since I have to get to the grocery store (forgot some things this morning). But...
Those apostrophes for plurals are driving me crazy too. It's even worse when used with proper names. We get Christmas cards from The Carter's for example. When I see this possessive masquerading as a plural, my mind says, "The carter's what? Their home? Their family? Their dog?" For some people, that terminal "s" doesn't look safe without the protection of the apostrophe.
The apostrophic plural (sorry for the neologism) is a little more defensible with those acronyms and numerals, as you point out, but I always write "VCRs" and think it's better.
While we're picking on people, let's mount an attack on the elimination of the adjectival past participle in grocery stores (since that's where I'm heading). I mean CAN VEGETABLES instead of CANNED. I saw a sign on the road offering BOIL PEANUTS, as if it were an exhortation or command. I speak pretty good Southern Dialect myself, so I can appreciate how the sign poster pronounces it himself: "Bawl PEE-nuts". But that's another subject.
Nice to hear from you. I thought this thread, which I just discovered, had been forsaken by all you language lovers. (How do we make a pseudoscientific word of that? I want to say linguaphiles, but that's mixing Latin and Greek, a "no-no". Maybe glottophiles? Anybody got any ideas?
Jack |
