Re: not for illiterate,s
- From: quirk@xxxxxxxx (Taki Kogoma)
- Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:55:12 +0000 (UTC)
On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:48:59 -0400, Stephen Rush <sjrush@xxxxxxxxxxx>
allegedly declared to rec.arts.sf.written...
On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:10:26 +0000, Dennis L. McKiernan wrote:
Neither comma nor apostrophe, but instead plural without either:
"Illiterates."
Anybody know where the idea that all English plural nouns take an
apostrophe came from? I can understand homonym confusion; a spellchecker
will tell you that "their", "there" and "they're" are all correct, even
though two of them will be wrong for a given use. I can even understand
the "its"/"it's" fumble, since most possessives do take an apostrophe.
But why did people on Usenet (and Web boards) start sticking apostrophes
into nouns that have standard plural forms? It's even beginning to ooze
into print; I recently saw a sign that read "EMPLOYEE'S ONLY."
My theory is that they somehow locked onto a rule along the lines of:
"To append an 's' to any word, use an appostraphe."
--
Capt. Gym Z. Quirk (Known to some as Taki Kogoma) quirk @ swcp.com
Just an article detector on the Information Supercollider.
.
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