Glaring apostrophe error in a book about law for the layman

Ed. has just renewed his membership in the Grammar Police. He has this advice for those who aspire to be published writers.

Apostrophes give many writers a lot of trouble. Sometimes, you might be tempted to put an apostrophe where it does not belong, such as when you are simply making a word plural. 

Other times, you need to make a word possessive, but you might forget to use the apostrophe. 

Then, of course, there is that whole its / it’s thing that confuses most everyone. Remember, the rule is to use an apostrophe when you need to show possession or ownership. 

The exception is with possessive pronouns such as my, your, his, hers, ours, their, and its. "Its" shows ownership while "it’s" is a contraction for "it is". So, just like "hers" and "his" are possessive pronouns that don’t use an apostrophe to show possession, "its" follows the same format. 

For more information on the apostrophe, be sure to check out the Apostrophe section in the Punctuation area of Grammar Essentials of the Excelsior Online Writing Lab. If you just need to brush up your skills, visit the Apostrophe Refresher. 

If  you don't follow these rules, you might end up with a sentence like this: 

Its abundantly clear to me that the rule’s of English grammar can be confusing and following it’s many exceptions even more so! 😒

WRONG! The sentence should read (and be punctuated) like this.

It’s abundantly clear to me that the rules of English grammar can be confusing and following its many exceptions even more so! 😀

Quick quiz: See how many apostrophe errors you can find in the title of the book pictured at left.

Answer: "Juror's", "Sheriff's", "Bailiff's", and "Justice's" are all WRONG, using the possessive form where the plural is wanted. This is not a joke, but a real book, advertised on the Thriftbooks website. We'll have to give the author a pass, as he's obviously a product of American education. And yes, "we'll" and "he's" are correct. They are contractions of "we will" and "he is".

Babylon Bee's guide too good grammar

Ed. here. You know that Walt and I are sticklers for the proper use of the language of Shakespeare... and modern English too, "modern" being the English spoken by the Queen... Victoria, that is. ("American English" is an oxymoron.)

For us, it's a constant struggle to find and correct grammatical and orthographical errors. We have been forced to throw in the towel on the Apostrophe Error, because even professional communicator's seem compelled to insert an apostrophe before all terminal s's. Its a sin and a shame, isnt it?

And (said he, beginning not just a sentence but a paragraph with a conjuntion) let us not even begin to discuss "pause words", such as "basically", "like" and the dreaded "so", with which persons of a certain age and gender begin every sentence. So what?

We are happy today to find that we are not fighting the battle on our own. One of Walt's favourite blogs, the Babylon Bee, has entered the fray with "A Handy Guide Too Using Good Grammar", a compendium of tips for avoiding common errors of grammar and speling. 

Read it and learn, and know that you will always have our well wishes.

UK grammar vigilante tackles apostrophe error's

Ed. here. Assiduous readers will know that the abuse and misuse of the humble apostrophe (') makes me [and Walt! Walt] wild. Sometimes we think we are alone in our campaign to stamp out egregious errors such as "It pay's to go Peugeot!" or "The Anderson's", referring to a family named "Anderson" who presumably live in the house so sign-posted. We are therefore encouraged by reports of others who are fighting the good fight for grammatical correctness. Agent 34 sends along this one, from the education section of The Grauniad.

For more than a decade, an unidentified corrector of poor English has been venturing out in the dead of night and tidying up the punctuation on store fronts and street signs in Bristol, England. On Monday, the BBC announced it had tracked him down and had accompanied him on one of his night-time missions.

The first sign he tackled, the man said, was council sign -- "Monday's to Friday's" -- and had "these ridiculous apostrophes, which I was able to scratch those off." He also corrected fixed a "gross" shop sign which read "Amys Nail's". "It was so loud and in your face. I just couldn’t abide it. It grates," he told the Beeb. Here we see him sorting out "Cambridge Motor's". The owners of the business thanked him for correcting the mistake.

The still unidentified language purist told the BBC, "I'm a grammar vigilante. I think it's a cause worth pursuing." He said he began by scratching out an extraneous apostrophe on a sign, but had since become more sophisticated and has built an "apostrophiser" -- a long-handled tool that allows him to reach up to shop signs to add in, or cover up, offending punctuation marks. "This is a device that enables you to plant an apostrophe quite high up and get over any obstacles," he said.

He also has a specially made stepladder that means he does not have to lean a conventional ladder against shop windows, and carries a set square and scalpel to make sure his work is neat and precise. When it was put to him that what he was doing was probably illegal, his defence was staunch: "I’m sticking on a bit of sticky-back plastic. It's more of a crime to have the apostrophes wrong!"

VIDEO: Weird Al Yankovic sings (?) about "word crimes"

Ed. here. We need a break from politics, race, and the wretched human condition. Here's a video I saved for just such a contingency. I particularly like Weird Al's explanation of the difference between "it's" and "its". Listen up.

Bill Bryson on declining standards of punctuation and grammar

Ed. here. Bill Bryson, best known for his travel books, has also written two fine books on the development and use of the English language. Mother Tongue and Made in America occupy positions of honour in Walt's working library. Mr. Bryson is also a stickler for proper usage of our language, as witness the following excerpt from his latest book, The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). Walt's working on a review, but showed me this passage (pages 220-222), which I couldn't wait to share with you.

On the platform at Cambridge station was a poster for a Jeremy Clarkson book. It had a photo of Clarkson looking adorably doleful and a caption that read: 'Dads. Everything they say. Everything they do. Everything they wear. Its all completely wrong.' Oh, the wit. But note the absence of the apostrophe in 'its'. I know it is way too much to ask that Jeremy Clarkson should take an interest in the literacy of his posters, but surely someone at Penguin ought to care.

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but evidently don't realize that there are fundamentals. Many people...seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle indiscriminately through any collection of words. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: 'Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results'. All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is 'the daily Telegraph'? Is it really possible to be that unobservant?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an email from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in the UK. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: 'Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families...'

In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and got the name of her own department wrong - this from a person whose job it is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a paediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word children's twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children's specialist working in a children's hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

People everywhere have abandoned whole elements of grammatical English, and I don't understand it.I was watching a Brian Cox television documentary in which he was standing in a field in Mexico talking about bombardier beetles when he said: 'The bombardier beetle and me, and in fact every living thing you can see, are exposed to the same threat... Me and my friend the beetle have both reached the same solution.' Now don't get me wrong. I have great respect for Brian Cox. He has a brain so big that it crosses whole time zones, and he is normally impeccable with the language, so why on earth would he say 'the bombardier beetle and me' when it is surely more natural, and clearly more respectable, to say 'the bombardier beetle and I'?

Soon after this, I watched a documentary by another eminent young scientist, Adam Rutherford, and he said: 'Now I've got just 33 vertebrae in my spinal column, but Belle here [a boa constrictor] has got 304, and the amazing thing is it's the same handful of genes that determine how many vertebrae both me and her have.'

Then I was watching a repeat of Outnumbered, which had this snatch of dialogue in it:
          Outnumbered kid: 'Why do I have to look after Karen?'
          Hugh Dennis: 'Because me and Mum and Ben are going to be at Ben's parents' evening.'
Hugh Dennis was educated at Cambridge in real life, and he plays a teacher who should really know better.

Then I heard Samantha Cameron, wife of the Prime Minister, say to a television interviewer, 'Me and the kids help to keep him grounded.'

So here is all I am saying about this. Stop it.

Random House Canada fails high school English

Ed. here. Since the blog belongs to me today, my words will appear in Roman letters, not italics. [Italics are mine. Walt.] Ahem... The blog is mine because the topic is proper English, knowledge of which seems to be lacking even at venerable publishing houses such as Random House Canada, part of the vast [or half-vast] organization known simply as Random House, "the world's largest English language trade publisher".

Things being a little slow here, I checked Random House's Canadian and international websites under "careers", thinking perhaps they would be looking for editors or at least proofreaders. Apparently not.

But why would I think there might be such a vacancy? Because I have just finished reading Peter Newman's When the Gods Changed: the Death of Liberal Canada (RHC, 2011) which appears to have been published without any proofing beyond what might have been done by a spell-check utility.

The quality of the output is, frankly, shocking. Errors of vocabulary, grammar, spelling and even punctuation abound. Here are some of them, shown in bold, with page numbers so you can check for yourself.

Before the "Introduction", there are two untitled pages which I suppose might be called a preface. On p. xii we find "This incidence of non-recognition..." Arrrggghhhh. Didn't we just post "'Incidents' vs 'incidence' -- what's the difference?". Oh wait, that was just this past July -- too late for Mr. Newman. [But he's even older than I am. He should know better! Walt]

Page 71 - "each new wave of Grits hot off the grittle" - I'm hoping this is not a spelling error, but an intentional neologism, a play on "Grits" which is slang for (Canadian) Liberals.

Page 80 - "until the midfifties" - "mid-fifties", surely, or possibly "mid-50s".

Page 102 - "waking a spectacular international decision" - How do you "wake" a decision? Perhaps Mr. Newman writes in longhand and the typesetter can't tell his M's from his W's.

Page 164 - "humming 'Il a perdu son epaulettes'" - Should be either "ses épaulettes" or "son épaulette". If you don't speak French, don't try to write it and expect an anglophone proofreader to fix it for you.

Page 224 - "'We're looking at a growing gap between the successive previous generation of immigrants like my dad, and the generation coming in from Africa and Asia.'" - Supposedly quoting Michael Ignatieff. What is a "successive previous generation"? Did Iggy actually say "successful"?

Page 236 - "...to send the matters to their respective parliamentary committees for consideration; he committees found..." - Missing a T there, but the spell-checker wouldn't catch that.

Page 242 - "After the first week of the campaign, Ignatieff's approval rating jump from nineteen percent to twenty-five percent..." - Tense trouble.

Page 256 - "[The Conservatives]...came under the leadership of nineteen individuals, many of whom gave anonymity of big boost." - What does this mean?

Page 264 - "To shift the burden of justified criticism on to his shoulders..." - Should be "onto", and yes, there is such a preposition.

Page 266 - "aimed at demoralizing Michael Ignatieff" - Supposedly from a "partial transcript" of an interview with Peter Donolo. My guess is Donolo said "demonizing", not "demoralizing", although Ignatieff probably was demoralized.

Noted twice - a member of a municipal council would be a "councilor" in the USA, but a "councillor" in Canada.

And finally, the piece of resistance (as Mr. Newman might have said)... Page 218 - "There has been a hard edge in the Conservative's pursuit of national competitiveness..." GAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! Does he really mean just one Conservative? No, this is clearly an apostrophe error, committed by Mr. Newman [who should know better. Walt] or an editor or proofreader who doesn't know how to construct a plural as opposed to a possessive.

Those at Random House or elsewhere large who weren't paying attention in Grade 8 English should read "Apostrophe Catastrophe" and "Let's kill the apostrophe ???". You're welcome.

Short book review from Walt: Leaving aside the problems with English usage noted by Ed., is When the Gods Changed worth reading? No. Fifty years ago, when he wrote for Maclean's and authored Renegade in Power (about the Diefenbaker years), Peter Newman was a crackerjack political commentator.

His last opus was supposed to be about the making of a prime minister. Such was the working title. Sadly for him (and RHC) Ignatieff led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history, and quickly resigned. Mr. Newman was left with under 300 pages (including generous leading) of shoulda/woulda/coulda. The book is proof positive that even a skilled writer can't make something out of nothing.

"Incidents" vs "incidence" -- what's the difference?

There is a general election going on (not "ongoing") in Zimbabwe today. Walt, being a former resident, is following the bumbling ["voting", surely! Ed.] closely, checking the tweets and online reports. He has just read the following:

"201 people have voted at Msiteli Secondary School in Bulawayo by midday. There are no major incidences recorded."

Walt is now huffing and puffing around the cabin, nearly apoplectic about the tweeter's misuse of the word "incidence". If it were just one product of the Zimbabwean education system, it wouldn't be so bad, but we are sick, sore and tired of hearing supposedly educated "journalists" in North America and Britain confuse "incidence" -- inevitably pluralized as "incidences", as above -- and "incidents". Let's straighten this out.

An "incident" -- singular -- is an individual occurrence or a happening. Thus, if a cop shoots an unarmed civilian at the corner of Jane and Finch, that's one incident. If another cop shoots another unarmed civilian at the corner of Yonge and Shuter [there really is such an intersection. Ed.], that's another incident. One incident plus one incident makes two incidents.

"Incidence" is the rate or range of occurrence or influence of something, especially of something unwanted, e.g. "the high incidence of heart disease in men over 40".

"Incidence" is a collective noun [like "vacuum cleaner". Ed.], and shouldn't be used in the plural -- incidences -- unless one is speaking of the rates of occurrence of two different things, e.g. "the incidences of both robbery and homicide have increased in integrated neighbourhoods". Even then, it's an awkward construction, best avoided.

Please forward this to all the English and journalism teachers on your mailing list. As if anyone cares, but we pedants can always hope.

Lets kill the apostrophe ???

We don't get a whole lot of comments on our posts. Some readers may think there's no point in arguing with someone who has his own printing press (figuratively speaking). But others, we think, don't write for fear that Ed. will catch a grammatical error and make fun of the commenter's inability to follow the rules of English grammar and composition.

This fear is not unfounded. Walt is the son of an English teacher. [Do you mean a teacher who was born in England or a teacher of the English language? Ed.] [Stop picking the nit. You know what I mean! Walt]

Aha! There's the problem, right there. It is possible to break the rules and still make oneself understood. "I seen it," grates on my son-of-an-English-teacher's ears, but I know what the speaker is trying to say.

Much of the time we cannot hear grammatical errors in oral speech. The speaker may not know whether he's saying "their", "there" or "they're", but the listener can work out the difference from the context. Consider these sentences. (1) Their coming was foretold by the prophet. (2) "They're coming," the prophet said, "just as I predicted." You don't even need to think about the spelling unless you have to transcribe what you heard.

Which brings us to the apostrophe. A mistake that makes me wild [and dangerous! Ed.] is the confusion of "it's" and "its", which we see nowadays even in "respectable" journalism. No-one knows which is correct because they have been taught (by teachers who themselves don't know the rules) that self-expression is more important than correct spelling and grammar.

If you were born after 1955, Walt will now teach you the rule. "It's" is a contraction for "it is". "Its" is the possessive of the third person singular neuter pronoun "it". Thus "It's raining outside so the dog went into its kennel" is correct... assuming the dog had been neutered. [Cute. Ed.]

But what difference does it make?! Someone could write "Its raining outside so the dog went into it's kennel" and the reader would understand perfectly well. You can't hear the apostrophe! It might as well not be there, as in "Its raining outside so the dog went into its kennel." Who cares??!!

That point has been made by many cunning linguists, including Richard Nordquist, founder of The Campaign to Abolish the Apostrophe. The comments on his six-year-old blog are worth reading, and largely support his case.

Mr. Nordquist's blog has inspired a newer website, Kill the Apostrophe, "for those who want to remove the apostrophe from the English language, on the basis that it serves only to annoy those who know how it is supposed to be used and to confuse those who dont."

Even purists like Walt and Ed. are just about convinced. The only problem is that if we get rid of the apostrophe, it won't be long before we're dropping the capital "I" (first person singular pronoun) in favour of "i", and writing abominations like "ur" instead of "you're"... Oh... Wait...

How we check our grammar

Ed. here. Walt (shown here at his writing desk) receives the occasional compliment on "his" use of English -- proper yet at the same time creative. I'll give Walt the "creative" part, but it is my job to ensure the "proper".
An assiduous reader wants to know what reference works we -- I -- use to avoid any faux pas. Naturally we have Fowler as our final arbiter. Some might think that explains our "Victorian" vocabulary and syntax, but they would be wrong! The first edition of Fowler was not published until 1926, during the reign of George V. Surely that is modern enough, and I prefer it to the 1965 second editon. The world -- and English -- had gone to hell by 1965.

When overindulgence renders me incapable of picking Fowler off the library shelf, I have recourse to a newer and much lighter work, which I commend to all aspiring writers and editors. It is The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Times Books, New York, 1984).

William Safire, whose classic On Language is also on Walt's bookshelf, called The Transitive Vampire "a book to sink your fangs into". I imagine Ms Gordon's tongue stuck firmly and permanently in her cheek as she crafts rules and examples of proper usage like this one:

A pronoun in apposition to a noun or another pronoun has the same case as the word it identifies.
Two misfits, he and she, plighted their troth in this haphazard way.
Let's you and me get together and do away with some of the possibilities.
(You and me are in apposition with 's, which equals us, the object of let.)

Karen Elizabeth Gordon wrote a companion volume, The Well-Tempered Sentence, which is chiefly concerned with proper punctuation, including Walt's pet peeve, the misuse of the apostrophe! There are second editions of both works: The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. All these fine (and incidentally funny) books may be found at the usual riverine source.

For recent j-school graduates, Walt explains English "confusables"

Walt was dismayed -- no, shocked! -- last week last week to see a story in the local Daily Fishwrap headlined "EMS team repels down gorge". Apart from a stern letter to the editor urging him to hire an English-speaking sub-editor, I haven't written anything since.

Do they teach English in journalism schools nowadays, I asked. Do they do any vocabulary-building exercises? Does spelling count? Are any of these things important any more? Or do "journalists" these days rely on their spell-checkers and e-thesauri?

Walt urges journalist wannabes and other aspiring writers to remember that the computer is merely a dumb beast of burden. It does what you tell it, no more and no less. If the spell-checker, let's say, gives you a choice, you still have to know the rules of spelling and grammar to make the correct choice.

So also with vocabulary. You have to know the meanings of words in order to spell them correctly. Is it "know" and "no"? "To" or "too"? Thanks to "text-talk" the trend is now to treat those distinctions as unimportant. If you write "I didn't no that", people will still geddit...right? They won't think you mean "I didn't deny that." Right?

Then there's the matter of contractions. We're talking grammatical contractions here, not the physical kind as in childbirth. But it seems recent graduates of j-school know more about the latter than the former, as we see from the frequent misuse of "there" for "they're" or, even more frequently, "your" for "you're".

As part of our little effort to raise the standards of written English -- or at least prevent them from slipping any further -- Walt will tell you the meanings and proper spellings of these "confusables".

"Your" = possessive, "belonging to you"
"You're" = contraction of "you are"
"Yore" = a long, long time ago, "days of yore"

"Their" = possessive, "belonging to them"
"They're" = contraction of "they are"
"There" = not here, "over there"

People who call themselves writers should know the difference. If you make a mistake writing a comment on one of Walt's posts, Ed. will print it just the way you wrote it, revealing your linguistic ineptitude for all to see.

The "only" problem

Ed. here. I was reading a little essay on the War of 1812 -- the only war the USA lost until Vietnam -- and came upon this sentence:
The war is only part of [Canadian] history because the Americans and the British decided to work out their differences on our land.

What does the writer (Barbara Smith) mean by "The war is only part of [Canadian] history..." Does she mean there's more, as in "only a part of [Canadian] history"? Or does she mean the war is a part of Canadian history only because...

The word "only" is like a penis. You have to be careful where you stick it. You must take care to place it immediately before the noun, verb or adjective you wish to modify because to put it close to some other word can change the whole meaning of your sentence. Here are some examples:

Only I told you I killed my wife. = No-one else told you.
I only told you I killed my wife. = I didn't put it in writing.
I told only you I killed my wife. = I didn't tell anyone else.
I told you only I killed my wife. = Nobody helped me.
I told you I only killed my wife. = I didn't do anything else to her.
I told you I killed only my wife. = No-one else.
I told you I killed my only wife. = I'm not a Muslim.

Thus endeth the only lesson... for today. You're welcome.

The perniciousness of bad grammar

Ed. here. Sometimes I wish I were editor of the Times (of London). They get excellent letters to the editor, so well-written, so witty, and frequently so odd. At least one book has been made of such interesting letters.

The Economist gets its share as well. This week's number includes one which I can't not share with you.

A new word order

Sir - I must object in the strongest terms to the use of the oxymoronic neologism, "bottomless shallows", in a Banyan column (August 27th). Please inform your Mr Banyan that oxymorons must be stamped out wherever found, and are particularly galling in a newspaper of your standing and heritage. I am certain that Messrs Samuel Johnson, Walter Bagehot and Henry Watson Fowler are all spinning in their respective graves at this slight, albeit at different speeds.

You know well how lapses like this affect school truancy, foment social disorder and encourage a preference for margarine on one's scones. Sin not again.

Ernie Jurick
Portland, Oregon

I cannot but admire Mr Jurick for his forthright stand against the dire effects of bad grammar. Good on yer, Ernie.

Apostrophe catastrophe

Went to town today and stopped at my favourite coffee shop -- hint: no lattes on offer there -- and found they have a new feature. Yessir, Vince has joined the wired world and is now offering a wi-fi section "for the convenience of our customer's". Sic.

Why "sic"? Because "customer's" is the possessive form of the noun "customer". I was left wondering...the (one) customer's what? The customer's cat? The customer's maiden aunt?

It's not Vince's fault. Misuse of apostrophes is everywhere these days, even in the media and the sign-painting community. I'm not talking about the endemic confusion of "its" and "it's"*, but such egregious errors as "It pay's to go Peugeot" and signs indicating that a cottage belongs to "the Smith's".

For those who went to school after "child-centred education" took hold, Walt presents the rules...

1. Use an apostrophe to indicate possession.
a) With nouns (both singular and plural) that do not end with the letter s, add an apostrophe and s. Canada's climate consists of nine months of winter and three months of bad skiing.

b) With plural nouns that end with s, add only an apostrophe. Flight attendants' duties include telling passengers to stay in their seats.

c) With singular nouns that end with s, add either the apostrophe alone or both the apostrophe and s, depending on which authority you choose to follow. William Strunk says you should always add 's, regardless of the final consonant. Thus, the witness's testimony.
An exception might be made for proper names ending in s: Jesus' robe, Dickens' novels, but certainly not Dicken's novels (because the author's name is Dickens, not Dicken)!

d) If possession is common to two or more individuals, only the last name takes the apostrophe: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
But if possession is not common, make each noun possessive: men's, women's and children's wear.

2. Use an apostophe in contractions to indicate omission of letters or numbers. Summer of `42 (not Summer of 42), can't, won't, he's, they're (for they are, not their or there!), you're (for you are, not your!!!), isn't, it's.

* Here's an easy way to remember the distinction between it's (the contraction) and its (possessive). It's raining outside so the dog went into its kennel.

3. Use an apostrophe with nouns that are followed by a gerund. Don't bother looking up "gerund". Here's an example: Walt's overeating led to three days of indigestion.

4. English being English, there are a couple of "special cases".
a) to form plurals of abbreviations that have periods: Ph.D.'s
b) with letters, where addition of s alone would be confusing: Mind your p's and q's!

All of which is fine, but begs the question: does anyone care any more? Perhaps not, but if you're writing, there's no harm in appearing to be literate, but great potential harm in the opposite. Think résumés...not résumé's.