Has anyone noticed that people’s grammar is getting worse? And spelling, eloquence and penmanship. Its sad, the art of prose seems to be dying a death - cheers sky TV.
Anyway, I was texting (since when did the word "text" become a verb?!?!) a friend, and he asked if I had told his ex-partner where he worked. Incidentally, I had, and told him that I did tell her because she seemed curious, and seeing as I know her pretty well, I knew her question was innocent and that she wasn’t going to make any problems for him in his new job. He replied “no worrie’s”.
I’ve noticed it getting worse and worse too, especially in the past few years. I remember once being surprised to see that a greengrocer had written “grape’s”, where he meant “grapes”, and I decided to pretend to not notice because I thought that everyone else had noticed and nobody wanted to embarrass him, maybe he was a little slow. That year was 2002.
Its amazing how common this mistake is. Do people just not know HOW to use an apostrophe?
Actually, soulcasters seem to all be pretty good with penmanship and grammar, I suppose this is because we view the written word as a hobby.
Anyway, I’d like to write out the correct use of the apostrophe, for anyone who doesn’t know about this grammatical symbol within our language that pre-dates us all. Maybe people who missed it were busy watching ‘Animals do the funniest things’ in H.D or something.
Use number one - implying ownership with a noun.
This is much simpler than it sounds - lets use my name, Seer, as the noun, and to make another noun belong to me we use the apostrophe an S after the noun. Easy, just like in the sentence “the red ball is Seer’s”, or “Seer’s house”, or “Seer’s long, rambling blog about nonsense” .
When doing the above with a noun ending in the letter S, we need an example word - I’m going to use Charles - its acceptable to write the apostrophe after the S or to add another S altogether and put an apostrophe before it, so we can write either “Charles’ hat” or “Charles’s hat”. Both are correct and have the same meaning.
Use number two - to ‘stick’ words together
Easier than it sounds. Lets take the long winded “it is” and shorten it. “It is” becomes “It’s” (which is confusing because that can mean plural of the word ‘it’). Or lets shorten “I would” to “I’d”. Or “have not” to “haven’t”.
Use three - to show relationships of description
The easiest way to explain is to show examples - “a hot summers’ day” or “three hours’ walk”.
Use four - as quotation marks
Because we don’t have a separate quotation mark on the keyboard, but many people in handwriting choose to make a distinction.
Use five - to show plural numbers and individual letters
If using capital letters this tends to be omitted and reinforced with lower-case letters. Lets say we are playing scrabble, and I only have cards with the letter T on them, I could use “I only have T’s”, or I could say “I only have Ts”, and when written its usually up to the author. With lower-case its almost essential, as in if I were to say “I only have t’s”, the apostrophe is essential because otherwise it becomes “ts” which could confuse the reader (especially if I’m using a letter like I, which, when not separated from a S without an apostrophe becomes another word, for example, “i’s” become “is”.
Also to avoid confusion when referring to plural numbers, “1980’s” looks a lot less confusing than “1980s”, and might be read as “nineteen-eighty S” or “one, nine, eight, zero, S”.
Use six - Old/Poetic English
Which is now rarely used but you may come across this in books pre dating the 1900’s, which shows the pronounced removal of letters, in words like “o’er” (to mean “over”), and ne’er (to mean “near“), or just o’ (to mean “of”, as in “cat of nine tails is a nasty whip”, becomes “cat o’ nine tails is a nasty whip”).
This is still prevailing in modern language, “fucking” becomes “fuckin’” and “because” can become “’cause”, “fish and chips” becomes “fish ’n chips” and so on.
And an afterthought - the word “it”
We can have “it is” shortened to “it’s” (as in “it’s going to blow!!”), or “its” to mean plural of “it”, or to imply ownership or descriptive relationship to (“It’s feet” or “It’s maiden voyage”).
Any other suggestions/corrections for my use of the apostrophe please don’t hesitate to comment, I have no qualifications in the English language, so what I have just written could be a load of fuckin’ shite.
And how long before someone says “hey Seer, I’ve got another use for your apostrophe, shove it up your arse, you limey fag” or something similar :-D
