Re: What type of foam is ok to use?

Jay Cunnington wrote: 
Keith wrote:

 > Sure, the 10 most often may well remain the same but the frequency of

the misspelling may still be greatly increased. The frequent usage of
'apostrophy s' to make plurals seems to be relatively new.
Keith


I guess a lot of kids were absent that day in first grade.


The belief that you can teach a concept once and it will "take" with everybody in the class is wrong. It takes repeated teaching/learning to "fix" a concept, especially one as confused and messy as the Use Of The Apostrophe In English.

The apostrophe is an ambiguous sign. First, it signals the omission of one or more letters, which makes it a spelling sign. Second, it signals case and number, but the sound of singular and plural possessives is almost always the same, and posessives of course sound like plurals.

Third, the apostrophe is an inconsistent sign. There is no possessive apostrophe for pronouns, which contradicts the use for nouns and names.

Finally, there is the problem of phrasal nouns (such as mother-in-law), which more and more people are treating as compound nouns (ie as motherinlaw). How you apprehend such nouns determines where you put the apostrophe (and where you put the plural 's', too.)

A footnote: let's ignore tradenames and trademarks, which ignore all rules.

With such a farrago of ambguity and inconsistency, the amazing thing is that most people do use the apostrophe correctly most of the time, and a sizeable minority use it correctly all the time. Unfortunately, that rarely includes sign writers and menu composers. :-)

HTH, and that's the last of the OT nit-picking in this thread, I hope. :-)
.

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