Blog: Articles filed under grammar

Furious doesn’t even begin to describe it. Town councilors in Birmingham, England have decided to drop apostrophes from signage. This unilateral decision about signage grammar is nothing less than a declaration of war against the English language. I call for a retaliatory preemptive strike.¹

I‘m appalled that people have the nerve to desecrate the English language in such a manner. It’s true that English evolves; we change the spelling of words, and we create new words to express new concepts. Yet this change is artificial and arbitrary, chosen because it supposedly clears up confusion around what a street name implies or how to locate it on a GPS.

Apostrophes seem to be a very controversial punctuation mark. Mind you, all punctuation marks have their little quirks. The comma is the overused youngest child; semicolons are the misunderstood middle child. As the oldest child, the colon tends to pick up the slack from its younger siblings. Periods are: final, definitive, and ubiquitous. Dashes and hyphens are like fraternal twins—similar-yet-different. None of these, however, attracts as much controversy as our friendly neighbourhood apostrophe. Some misguided people try to use the apostrophe to denote plurality, appending apostrophe s to the end of words. This, apparently, is called the “greengrocer’s apostrophe” (note the possessive apostrophe example).²

This annoys me.

And don’t even get me started on the debate between whether a plural possessive should be ’s or s’. I personally prefer the latter, as in “The monks’ cells were small and square.” Hardcore grammarians even debate it down to the plurality of the noun itself—i.e., “monks’” is OK, but “James’” is not, since James is a single person.

The Yahoo! news article quoted Councilor Martin Mullaney, who said:

Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed…. More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don’t want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it.

Let’s break that down into its component issues. Firstly, Mullaney contends that apostrophes denote obsolete possessions—i.e., the monarchy no longer owns “King’s Heath”, so it should just be “Kings Heath”. In other words, Mullaney wants to sacrifice historical context in order to save the cost of printing another character on a sign.

Secondly, and more troubling, is the idea that one needs a high school diploma in order to navigate streets that have apostrophes in their names. While I‘m certain that Mr. Mullaney was employing hyperbole with that remark, it implies that one needs a formal education of any sort to understand the use of an apostrophe. As far as I’m concerned, one really only needs to be literate in the English language. If you can‘t read English, you’re going to have trouble reading the street signs anyway.

If this decision stands, it sets a terrible precedent for future grammar legislation. Those of us who love the English language for the beautiful lexical syntax that it is are fast becoming an endangered species. We must stand strong and stand together in these dark times.

• [ 1 ] You may be wondering how that is possible—suffice it to say, considerable amounts of power and some time travel would be involved.
• [ 2 ] From Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style, my favourite online resource for grammar matters.

I have discovered something extremely disturbing today, which I cannot let go unremarked and uncorrected. I have discovered that I don’t know the term for a group of groundhogs!

Wikipedia has a very nice list of animal names, which includes the collective nouns for each animal. Groundhogs, and even marmots, are noticeably absent from that list. A quick Google search reveals that I’m not the only crazy person out there. Now what do I do if I come across a ___ of mafia groundhogs who attempt to “make me an offer I can’t refuse” and barely escape with my life? How am I supposed to recount such a tale if I don’t know the correct collective noun to use?!

I mean, is it just because groundhogs are largely solitary? But they still live together in burrows. So do we call them “burrow groups”? Families? Or, if you look at the list of animal names, a group of squirrels is called a “dray” or “scurry.” Since groundhogs are marmots, and marmots are a type of ground squirrel, do these terms apply to groundhogs? Can you apply hypothetical syllogisms to collective nouns? So far it’s the best lead I’ve got.

Yesterday was a bad grammar day. I kept on noticing so many little grammar mistakes everywhere I went, and it really annoyed me. By far, however, the largest one was pointed out to me by my coworker—this sign on the front of our GM dealership.

Take a moment to look at it. “Last year GM more than doubled the sales of it’s nearest competitor.” Firstly, there’s the glaringly obvious mistake: “it’s” means it is. In context of the sentence, I believe they meant to use “its”. This is a common mistake for reasons that escape me—how hard is it to memorize when to use its and when to use it‘s?

Now read the message again, slowly. What do you think it is saying? GM has more than doubled the sales of its competitor? To me, that sounds like GM has more than doubled its competitor’s sales, which is to say, its competitor’s sales have been doubled because of GM. So now GM is helping its competition? Right.

So I decided that the only thing to do was to ask about it. Today my friend Alex and I went to the GM dealership and asked about the sign. They were really quite pleasant. An artist from Saskatchewan hand-painted the sign right onto the glass. They were aware of the grammatical error but not the phrasing issue—the sentence itself comes from a GM report. The general manager wasn’t in, but I did get his business card. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it—I was just curious, and the only way to satisfy my curiosity was to ask. So far I am apparently the only person to actually come in and ask about the sign.