When did this trend of pluralizing words by adding a gratuitous apostrophe before the s begin? I don’t remember seeing this before a few years ago, and now it’s all over the place. Certainly nobody ever learned this in school.
English is a very tough language to learn. Just about THE ONLY THING THAT’S EASY is being able to pluralize most words by adding an s.
Comics I Don't Understand 
It’s been going on for a *long* time.
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-greengrocers-apostrophe-1690826
It’s been one of my mom’s pet peeves for my entire life. She’s a former English teacher.
I’ve seen it all my life. It’s a mild form of illiteracy.
If you want to do it right, there are rules about pluralizing… sometimes you add s, sometimes es, sometimes a complete alternate ending (child/children). Oh, yeah, and sometimes the same work covers both plural and singular.
So, you’re seeing the language evolve to a simpler-to-apply-rule. You can fight it, if you want, but in a couple of decades students will be learning to pluralize by adding apostrophe S, as if that’s always been the rule.
The online increase in this is just part of the atrophy of literacy that comes with over-dependence on spell-check.
@Bob Peters
All is subjective but I think I’ve seen an online decrease in this. And as Bill points out, anyone who knows this will never actually ever make.
Oh, an in between which I bet Bill has seen is the house signs declaring “The Smith’s”. No one may think, that makes sense; it’s short for The Smith’s resident. But … it isn’t. That would be The Smiths’ which of course you never see and it clearly talking in the sense of “We are the Smiths”.
But James, how is adding an apostrophe “simplifying”?
‘how is adding an apostrophe “simplifying”?’
If you pluralize by adding ‘s, it’s consistent. You don’t have to worry about when to (or not to) change a Y to I; you don’t have to worry about whether to add S or ES; you don’t have to worry about irregular plurals (like geese vs. mongooses).
I’m not in favor of it, but I can see that it could simplify English.
I can’t think of the title or artist, but someone wrote a song about the last person on the Internet who knew when to use ITS and when to use IT’S.
There is a little problem when you make a word that ends in s or Z – or is plural – possessive, Throw in an e? Apostrophe at the end? – but the main thing is that these problems aren’t problems in spoken language, and we’re now in a world where many people who grew up speaking are now communicating in writing.
Sort of topical:
“So, you’re seeing the language evolve to a simpler-to-apply-rule. ”
No we aren’t. Children, Mice, fish, geese are still exactly the same. The only thing that is happening is the plurals that end in s are given an apostrophe because … that’s what it seems like you do when you add an s to the end of a word. Now in thirty years kids might get taught that when adding an s to make a word possesive or plural you add an apostrophe s. But I doubt it. I imagine there are lingo-sociologists out there and I imagine the things that make verbing nouns and “you and I” common and normal don’t apply to the grocer’s apostrophe. But I suppose I should let the lingo-sociologist predict.
woozy, I point out the same to you. You can fight it, but they will continue to not care what you think. “Thru” didn’t used to be a word, either, or “donut”. But the change will go on, with or without your blessing.
Found the song! It’s by Power Salad:
http://www.madmusic.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=35761
BTW, like the geese-mongooses distinction, long ago some experts said that two rodents would be MICE, but two pointing devices should be MOUSES.
Bill, I suspect selective memory or attention on your part. That abysmal apostrophic abuse is not novel. (I just blogged about some really terrible language use by the US Navy, as it happens.)
carlfink, I never said it was new: I said it was becoming more pervasive.
carlfink, are you aware that that blog site shows just a blank page to a user who has scripting turned off? For security reasons, I turn on scripting only if there’s something I *need*, rather than something I’d like to read.
No, @Arthur, I was not. I have very little control over Blogger, Google’s blogging platform.
You could make the same complaint about possessive pronouns.
It’s just a general dumbing down of, dare I say it, Americans. We can fight it – and I know *I* will – but we’ll never win. Oh, maybe a battle or two, but never the war.
I don’t understand the difficulty; an apostrophe indicates a replacement. How simple can it be to verify it in one’s mind?? Obviously, not simple enough.
‘Nuff said.
I’ve seen speculation about the natural history of that practice, so to speak. One thing that might have pushed it is the problem of pluralizing a symbol that you display.
That is, I can ask you “How many fives are in 505152535?” without having a spelling crisis. But suppose instead of the word ‘five’ I wanted to use the numerical digit.
If we’re going for a typeset book or journal article, some style guides would italicise the numeral and abut the plural s immediately. Less formally, many writers would skip italics but abut the numeral and the s. [That would usually be my choice. ] But many others, including writers who would not ordinarily use an apostrophe in an ordinary word-plural, want to mark the displayed symbol in some special way, and use the apostrophe as a sort of quotational device.
How many fives are there…
How many 5s are there…
How many 5s are there…
How many 5’s are there…
Then this could come to be seen as the plural marking even when there is no issue of quotational marking.
I used to follow the “Apostrophe Abuse” blog. It has posts going back to 2005.
http://www.apostropheabuse.com/
Personally, I haven’t noticed a recent increase in the problem, and I usually notice that sort of thing. But we move in different circles, so it might just be more pervasive in your area (of real life or web sites you visit).
Synchronicity: Anu Garg at wordsmith.org today is calling for the abolition of apostrophes.
Speaking of making new words . . .
And of course there are missing apostrophes, too. My dad used to wish for an apostrogun, which would add/remove apostrophes on demand. I’d buy one!
I feel like I’ve written this before, but: a company that I might or might not work for has a tendency to use apostrophes for plurals in corporate communications. It’s common enough that a group in the company tend’s to put them into IMs and internal email a’s often a’s po’s’sible ju’st to be irritating. And it’s quite painful to read (or to write!) And of course it’s referred to as the ” apo’strophe” (and there’s an S in the company name, which gets its own apostrophe, too).
This video seems relevant to the discussion at hand – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCaZs6sYTa8
I also bemoan the loss of distinction between “can” (ability) and “may” (permission) in the modern world.
Bob, thanks for getting me back to Anu Garg. In the piece you reference, I would note he mentions the special case I described above, of a symbol being quoted and pluralized by apostrophe:
We still use the apostrophe to indicate a plural in some cases. For example: How many i’s are in the word “distinction”?
I don’t know why people get apostrophe usage wrong. It’s easy to get it right if you just mind your p’s and q’s, and make sure never to use apostrophe’s to pluralize. I learned this rule a long time ago, around the same time I learned my ABC’s.
…except that many style guides would not use apostrophes for Ps and Qs or ABCs. Just sayin’. OTOH, that’s the only time it actually gets complicated (aside from the possessive “its”, which is all but a lost cause at this point, alas–not that that will stop some of us from continuing the battle!).
“woozy, I point out the same to you. You can fight it, but they will continue to not care what you think.”
James, that is *NOT* why I said I doubt it. And although donut is an acceptable spelling (and 40 years ago so was sox but no-one does that any more) thru is not acceptable for publishing but accepted for signage and text and personal communication. And “between you and I” is acceptable is the act of verbing nouns “Let’s interface”.
But I doubt ‘s for plural will.
That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying it won’t because it’s wrong or I won’t let it. I’m saying I *doubt* it will because I don’t think it has the invasive permanence and self-insistence that those other abuses have.
It doesn’t reflect speech but only spelling and it’s the spelling of illiteracy so it isn’t done by anyone publishing. And although it is incrediably common it is not particularly noticeable (Bill, like all of us, has been seeing it his entire life but never noticed it until a few years ago). The entire reason it *is* common is because in is not noticeable and the abusers don’t know it is wrong.
This just doesn’t seem to be the same type of error as the others. But I’m not an expert. Which is why I would call upon “lingo-sociologists” if only such a field existed.
Now I don’t think it’s going to go away! Not at all. I imagine it will always be an untaught colloquialism which will always confound people where it comes from. But I doubt it will ever be taught or seen as standard.
Is “sox” (a misspelling of “socks”) and the moderation filter?
Every time I hear someone overcorrect ‘often’ to ‘off-ten’ I want to scream. Do you say ‘liss-ten’ or ‘sof-ten’??? NO!
But stopping the rolling change of a language is like trying to stop the tide with a broom.
Careful there, Chak. Even Oxford says:
Usage When pronouncing often, some speakers sound the t, saying /ˈôftən/; for others, it is silent, as in soften, fasten, listen. Either pronunciation is acceptable, although /ˈôfən / is more common.
The non-silent T is more common in British English, but it’s hardly “wrong”. It’s just dialect.
“Do you say ‘liss-ten’ or ‘sof-ten’??? NO!”
I do now! :)
I don’t know that it’s more frequent. I think we just see more content in the form of social media of all sorts. Comment sections have grown it frequency and popularity.
In English it’s frequently perilous to apply the pronunciation of a similarly-spelled word to another. Consider, “bomb”, “comb”, and “tomb”.
This was not intended to start a discussion of serial comma use.
Or as Doctor Seuss points out “The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough”.
My daughter has just learned a bunch of rules-of-thumb in kindergarten about how to sound out words. When she’s reading to me, she’ll often stop and say something like “Why does this word end in ‘e’? It’s got a ‘g’ in the middle, and the ‘q’ is after the ‘x’, so the ‘e’ should be silent unless it’s after a ‘y” (Or something like that).
I feel bad, because I always end up saying “I don’t know the rule you’re talking about, English pronunciation is pretty random, and I just know that’s how I spell/pronounce that word.”
OK, here’s another one I don’t understand . . . “It’s got a . . .”, which means ‘it has got ‘. . . which is redundant. I think ‘got’ if one of my top five most-loathed words/usages (in a tie with ‘guys’).
I believe that’s a perfect/imperfect thing.
WW alluded to it earlier with ABC’s, but I tend to use an apostrophe when pluralizing acronyms. It might not be correct, but words like RPMs just looks like the s may be part of the acronym.
@ Andréa – The construction “it has got…” does sound hopelessly redundant to an American ear, but it is perfectly normal in British usage.
But I hear/read it in America, NOT UK . . .
“It got…” just sounds wrong. :-P
Actually, “It has got…” sounds OK to me because of rhythm and accent. I’d swear that many turns of phrase in English exist because of this, and might sound a little clunky if you went for a strict sense of grammar.
Like “qu’est-ce que c’est” is not redundant or anything…
This was in front of a major New York City bookstore last June, cementing my fear that literacy is doomed:
That’s actually a simple one, Phil:
An acronym can be pronounced (SNAFU) while an initialism can’t (CIA).
Where CIDU falls is still, after 23 years, anybody’s guess.
Bill: right, just that people don’t follow that rule either. And pedantic as I tend to be, I can’t really bring myself to take that distinction seriously. This is especially true since I know a guy who pronounces all initialisms as words: “AB-CUD” for “ABCD”, etc.
Phil, that doesn’t make the distinction any less correct.
And if people want to promounce initialisms as if they were acronyms, well, they’re the one’s sounding silly. And they’re the one’s who’ll need to keep expining to people what they’re talking about, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.
Do I point out that Bill just used apostrophes for “ones”? Naw, I better not.
I mean ‘it has’, not ‘it got’ or ‘it has got’ . . .
Didn’t we have a discussion about this same sign last year? I could’ve sworn we did . . .
CIDU is an initialism to me . . .
Phil Smith III: Nice bit of paralipsis there. ;)
What a time to be victimized by Autocorrect!
Actually, the irony is, in a FB discussion on this topic yesterday, somebody wrote to me “My phone often autocorrects my plurals into possessives.” So I kinda should have been watching out for this.
Very likely, Andréa: but I thought it was relevant here (and we do, after all, have a lot of new folk).
Hah. A cow-orker IMed me something today that included a mention of a “she’ll script”. Since his daughter is also (nick)named “Shell” (for “Michelle”), it was extra-confusing.
Autocorrect will be the death of us all, I’m certain.
“An acronym can be pronounced (SNAFU) while an initialism can’t (CIA).”
Surely anything *can* be “pronounced” — isn’t that what living in a free country, watered with the blood of patriots who with their last full measure of devotion have thrown off the shackles of the Pronunciation Police, is all about? Wake up, sheeple!
But yes, if you insist on pronouncing things so that others can (a) understand what you’re saying and (b) not break out in hysterical giggles, it gets more complicated. So the secret is not to care about that. IYKWIMAITYD.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of opinion whether an initialism can be pronounced or not. SQL purists say “Es-cue-ell” but I always said “sequel”. But why not “Squeal”? SCSI was “scuzzy” but not “sexy”. We called CICS “syses”. DOS was “doss” (not Spanish two) but OS was Oh Ess. WYSIWYG was “wizziwig” but RPM was never “rappem”. The IRS is never the erse but your IRA could be Ira as in Gershwin.
By the way, RPMs should be RsPM like attorneys at law, not attorney at laws. Oh, and place names in the United States never have apostrophes with five exceptions, one of which is Martha’s Vineyard.
Mark: CICS as “syses”? Never heard that. What I’ve mostly heard is see-eye-see-ess in the U.S. and “kicks” in U.K. Canadians, um, swing both ways. Not arguin’, just surprised to hear a third pronunciation after 40 years in the mainframe world! Who knows, there may be pockets of some OTHER pronunciation yet…
I just wanted to know if I was imagining things, OR if it was on another blog/board/list that this same sign had come up . . .
Andréa: It was here. https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2018/06/12/yes-it-matters-ot/
“It doesn’t reflect speech but only spelling and it’s the spelling of illiteracy so it isn’t done by anyone publishing.”
This wildly inaccurate statement is why you’re wrong. “Publishing” is a MUCH broader category today than it was 2 or 3 decades ago.
Once, at Share, I got a button that said, “CICS are for trids”.
One acronym that could be pronounced (but isn’t) is V.I.P.: everyone says “vee-eye-pee”. Everyone, that is, except the Germans, who dropped the periods when they imported the term, and say “vip”.
P.S. @ Bill – As soon as I tried to pronounce CIDU, I discovered why it will never catch on: it sounds exactly like a brand name for a water scooter: “Sea-Doo”.
Case in point:
Andréa, I took the photo, so it was probably only here.
My sense from scanning a few online dictionaries is that the distinction between ACRONYM and INITIALISM is disappearing.
And I pronounce this site as “sidyou” which doesn’t sound like “seedoo”.
It’s been happening for decades among rural sign painters.
Also, there is a good chance that whatever seems to you to be a “recent degeneration of the English language” has been in fact been going on for centuries without things going to Hell. Language changes, after all, and literary language always coexists with colloquial speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_illusion
OK, here’s another one I don’t understand . . . “It’s got a . . .”, which means ‘it has got ‘. . . which is redundant.
It’s one of those situations where, at least in speech, people don’t compose an entire sentence first but do it by pieces. Once you’ve committed to the contraction, then if you leave out the “got” it become “it’s a . . . ” and seems like “it is a . . . ” is meant. But no.
“By the way, RPMs should be RsPM like attorneys at law, not attorney at laws.”
The discussion often comes up with the RBI (baseball), standing for Run Batted In. Some people insist that the plural is still RBI, for Runs Batted In, while others go with RBIs. The logic is that the latter acronym/initialism (some people do pronounce it “ribbie”) is a word itself that can have its own plural.
Woozy – “The Smiths’ ” would make more sense as it would be sort of saying that the house the sign is on is “the Smiths’ house”.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Book by Lynne Truss
A bear eats shoots & leaves – but if written incorrectly he eats (something), shoots (a gun?) and then he leaves.
That reminds me that Dan Quayle had “The Quayle’s” on his mailbox. And that was 30 years ago.
Whose mailbox is this? Why, it’s Quayle’s mailbox!
(Yeah, except “The Quayles” implies there’s more than one of them, so really, if it’s identifying mailboxes, it should be “The Quayles'” — I tried….)
Lynne Truss writes entertainingly, but I would not trust her grammar advice.
@Mark in Boston: I used to promote the pronounciation of http www as “hippety hop woo woo woo.” My co-workers were amused.
Sorry, that should of course have been “My cow-orkers were amused.” (Easy mistake to not make.)
IRA could be Ira as in Gershwin.
But we know it’s IRA Roth, don’t we?
Phil Smith III, Thanks for that. I do hope that makes it less annoying.
My BIL always pronounces ‘schedule’ ‘shedyule’ like the Brits. It always makes me want to ask him if his daughter is doing well in shul. (He visited England. Once.)
Here’s an apostrophe catastrophe you might enjoy:
https://i.chzbgr.com/full/8319498496/hB0D5792A/
@Shrug:
“I used to promote the pronounciation of http www as ‘hippety hop woo woo woo.'”
Hey, I like that!
But as for today… how would “https” (with an “s”) be pronounced?
(Maybe just “hippety hops” ?)
Is this a job for Apostrophe Person?
Is he able to turn down the noise of the tv belonging to his neighbors (neighbors’), OR is he able to turn down the [noise of] the neighbors themselves (neighbors)?
@ Andréa – I think the second panel is correct as written (“turn down … neighbors” meaning “to shut off all their voices”). It is, after all, a “universal” remote.
” It is, after all, a “universal” remote.”
Oh, dog – WHERE CAN I GET ONE O’ THOSE????? I wonder if amazon.com carries ’em . . .
Can’t argue with a comic!
Mitch4 – IRA Roth – Ira Gershwin’s cousin?
Well yes, one keeps hearing about “conventional Ira” and “Roth, Ira”.
Usually “traditional IRA”.
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/traditional-and-roth-iras
Today’s vintage Buz Sawyer at Comics Kingdom , which seems to be from 1956, has dialog balloon in the last panel (I’m lowering the all-caps) “Boy, oh boy, oh boy! Wait’ll the guy’s down below hear about this!” (with apostrophe+s pluralizing “guy”).
URL to the page: https://www.comicskingdom.com/buz-sawyer/2019-07-12
since I don’t think the image-only URL would work in this case, but here it is for your inspection or in case it does work:
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/api/img.php?e=png&s=r&file=L0J1elNhd3llci8xOTU2LzAzL0J1el9TYXd5ZXJfYncuMTk1NjAzMjAucG5n
Brian in StL – I clipped Bob’s Quick Guide when I first saw it, but it was in black & white – thanks for the color version.