Remember in grade school how you learned about making things plural? It was mostly pretty easy - you just had to tack a letter 's' to the end of your noun and voila: plural! Sure, there were the occasional words that required you to add 'es' instead of just 's', but that was no big deal, right? Life was pretty good back then. Grammar was easy stuff and you were its master.
Oh, but then there was that epically dark day when you learned about possession and your world just sort of imploded. Why would they use your precious letter 's' for an entirely different function than plurals? Who thought up this mess? The only way to differentiate between plurals and possessives were these pesky little tick marks hovering oh so innocuously, mocking the previously perfect system. That day shall forever haunt you as the day apostrophes ruined everything. Possessives got tricky when you had to remember different rules for who was owning what and how many things were owned. That's when the two 's' worlds really collided: when plural things were possessed, possibly by plural owners.
As an aside, that's also when the whole there/their/they're fiasco erupted.
From that day onward, the letter 's' has been subjected to all kinds of misery, and the once-functional apostrophe started being strewn about. People just sort of forgot that you don't need an apostrophe to pluralize a word, even if the word is really weird. If a particular word is sort of new or unfamiliar to you, or colloquial, or spelled funny, these are not reasons to add an apostrophe. If you're talking about a decade, it's the '80s, not the 80's (the reason there is an apostrophe at the beginning of '80s is because it is short for 1980s, and the apostrophe takes the place of the chopped off 19).
Even though you learned about apostrophes after you learned about plurals, thereby making apostrophes the more advanced of the two concepts, and even though apostrophes are the more tricky to use, you absolutely do not look smarter when you use them where none are necessary. Trust me on this.
Monday, July 12, 2010
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About Me
- Anacredenza
- Anacredenza is a screen name I made up back when I first joined a debate forum. At that time, I was just about finished figuring out what my beliefs are, and the name, which means 'renewed belief' reflects that. I cannot claim to know everything (not even remotely close!), but I'm now comfortable with what I believe, which I discovered were my deep, though covered-up, thoughts all along, and have therefore been renewed. I may be right, or I may be wrong, but at least now I'm being true to myself. After figuring this out, I went back and talked with people who hold beliefs that I used to share, to test my new (and old) thoughts on the matter. After several years of that, I am much more comfortable with what I believe. I don't care very much about what other people believe any more, as long as they don't use their beliefs to justify harming other people. That said, I care a great deal about how people come to their conclusions - thorough, critical thinking skills are important, and if more people just knew how to think, the whole world could be a much less hostile place.