The grocer’s missing apostrophe

March 21, 2015 • 11:57 am

There’s a punctuation error called the “grocer’s apostrophe,” apparently often seen in grocery stores. It’s an apostrophe placed where it shouldn’t be, as in plural nouns. When I worked for the Cambridge Food Co-op in grad school, for instance, I had to put up with this sign on the spuds: “Potatoe’s.”

But when I was in my local grocery store yesterday, I saw a grocer’s missing apostrophe:

Bad punctuation

Besides the annoyance of seeing a sign (turned towards me) announcing what item the cashier should push, as well as the idea that “Pretzel Crisps” is singular, there’s that missing apostrophe in “its”—twice!

Don’t people ever check if they’re unsure? Or are they not unsure?

 

120 thoughts on “The grocer’s missing apostrophe”

  1. The annoying certainty of ignorance, one suspects.

    My mnemonic is “the possessive its does not possess an apostrophe, ironically.”

  2. Frankly, my dear, I don’t think they give a damn.

    Which is a damned shame. Makes you wonder what else they don’t give a damn about. Like, for example, that other sign about washing hands…?

    b&

  3. It is with a heavy heart that I come clean.

    When I am typing on my phone, I often leave out apostrophes, especially on ‘it’s’, because it can be rather difficult to defeat the auto correct and put the apostrophe in place with one large, clumsy finger:P

    1. If you have an iPhone and want to add an apostrophe, just type the last letter twice. For example, type itss to get it’s. This is much faster.

        1. My android phone, and tablet, displays it’s, can’t and so on if you type its, cant. You then select the correct version.

          The misuse of it’s instead of the possessive pronoun its is so prevalent that it has become almost the norm. The Guardian, the Telegraph, Canad’s National Post all display this misuse in their comment columns. Lynn Truss might as well never have existed.

          1. On my android now. It doesn’t always display it’s as an option. This time it *did*. Often it doesn’t.

    2. When texting on my non-smart 10-button phone, I usually commit all possible grammatical errors, from missing punctuation to missing capitals to random abbreviations (as in ‘c u l8r’)

      My excuse is that I’m an extremely slow and painful txtr and so lng as t msg is intelgbl thts enuf

      That does not excuse grocer’s, however 😉

  4. You got it – they’re never unsure. Probably don’t know there’s a difference between it’s and its.

  6. Much as I dislike this mixing up of it’s and its, I don’t find it nearly as obnoxious as the apostrophe in plural’s (sic). The New Yorker had a definition of apostrophes a while back: something like “Warning that an “s” is imminent…”

    On a more positive note, those pretzel crisp’s, especially the one’s covered in dark chocolate, are to die for! The chocolate + peppermint one’s ain’t bad neither;-)

    Another weird screw-up is when The Smiths put The Smith’s on their mailboxes.

      1. I don’t think that The Smith’s would be correct in either case, unless Smith ran around calling himself The Smith.

        1. Dpending on the sub-calling, Smith might call himself The Farrier, The Ironmonger, The Tinker, The Jeweller…

      2. I tried explaining the grammatical error to my old man one time. His response: “I’m The Kukec because I bought the goddam mailbox. You wanna be The Kukec? Start paying for things like mailboxes.” Can’t refute logic like that.

    1. Great poster!

      That remeinds me of the Kingdom of Loathing online game (google it, it’s hilarious). To get access to the chat rooms you have to pass a test: there/their/they`re? your/you’re? and of course its/it’s?
      Rumour has it that quite a few people have trouble passing the test.

  8. As Program Chair for a regional biology association, I had to proof the titles of submitted abstracts this month. There were at least a dozen or more instances of a failure by authors to include the possessive apostrophe (as in Tennessee’s rivers, etc.). Is it carelessness, or do students (and faculty!)no longer know proper grammar? It really bugs me. And don’t get me going on whether data are plural or not.

    1. Speaking of data, who says dayta and who says daata? I say dayta, but I seem to be in the minority up in Canuckland.

      1. For that matter, is there anyone at all who still regards “data” as plural and continues to use “datum”?

        1. How about “media?” When I studied Mass Communications in college, this was a pet peeve among the profs. ” A ‘medium’ is a means of communication. ‘Media’ is the plural of ‘medium.’ There is no single entity called ‘the media!’ Do NOT say ‘The media is brainwashing our children.’ You say ‘The media ARE brainwashing our children.'” I committed this to memory, but I’m evidently the only person who ever did. I don’t ever remember hearing anyone say “The media are . . .”

          And then there’s “none.” I was taught in school that “none” means “not one;” therefore we should say “None of them is going” not “None of them are going.” I always followed this rule. Now I’m told that “none” means “not any” not “not one;” “None are going” is correct.

          It ain’t easy trying to talk good.

          1. Yes, that’s the widely accepted new singular except for specific uses where ‘datum’ has connotations of ‘baseline’ or ‘origin’ against which (other) data are measured (e.g. stratigraphic boundaries, mean sea level and other geodetic surfaces).
            Data went from being a plural of a count noun to a grammatically-singular mass noun (something Pinker has discussed in one or more books) as a natural result of scientific and other technical datasets becoming astronomically large and hence infinitesimally divisible.

      2. I say dayta. So do all my Canuck colleagues and we say it a lot because we are always dealing with it. I think a lot of pronunciations are regional within countries. For instance, someone from Nova Scotia mocked me for pronouncing “tour” “two-er”. She thought it was said “toor”.

        1. Virtually all my Ontario math teacher colleagues said daata, as did most of the kids. I say toor, and my students always made fun of the way I said room – they said it sounded like rum.

          2. I wonder how much influence the Star Trek character Data has on the way people pronounce it?

        2. We all know you guys talk funny up there, but is it true what they say about marital carnal relations and the Saturday night televised hockey game?

          1. I don’t know, I’m not really a hockey fan. I can tell you that I once saw my friend cleaning the snow off her car with a hockey stick. I figured that was a really Canadian moment.

      3. Daata is english english and very pompous at that.
        Dayta is acceptable. But Dayta can be confused with a lovable android.
        The correct pronunciation is “Datta” – this works in England, Canada and the USA.

        1. “Daata is english english and very pompous at that.”

          Since when? Everybody I know says ‘daata’ – are you suggesting everybody I know is pompous?

          That sort of pronouncement is extremely pompous. And asinine. And pompous. Grrr.

  9. I actually kind of enjoy my weekly grocery shopping trips, but it annoys me that there are “cashier talking points.” The store already pushes enough items with the mailbox flyers, coupons, and end-cap (or whatever they’re called) displays. Unless you want to shop at MalWart or Whole Paycheck, there is really only one grocery chain “choice” in my area, so I guess I have to put up with the cashier talking points. Just adds to my love/hate dilemma with the local grocery chain: on the one hand, they promote decent nutrition projects with local school districts and provide healthy post-race noms at local running and cycling events, but on the other hand, the items they typically push in the stores are the overly-processed unhealthy ones.

  10. I rarely see the contraction “it’s” spelled without the apostrophe. What bugs me most is the pronoun “its” spelled with an apostrophe. Along with all the fine examples mentioned in merilee’s comment at #6. It seems as though the rule is: “When in doubt, add an apostrophe.” I have always called this affliction “apostrophitis.”

  11. At least they got “this week’s” correct. I once banned a manager I had from using semi-colons because he had no idea how to use them. Similarly, if you can’t handle apostrophes, avoid them and write out the whole word.

  14. “Don’t people ever check if they’re unsure? Or are they not unsure?”

    “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ to consider that you might be wrong.” (from memory)

    – Oliver Cromwell

  15. I used to be a member of the apostrophe police until I got my comeuppance. Passing a camera shop, I saw this notice: We will print your digital photo’s and transfer your old video’s.

    I entered the shop to arrest the proprietor.
    ME: “Plurals do not have an apostrophe.”
    PROP.: “Of course I know that. The apostrophes in ‘photo’s’ and ‘video’s’ represent the missing letters g r a p h.”

    Collapse of stout party.

    1. Strictly speaking, there should be one apostrophe for each missing letter, which results in photo””’s and video””’s.

      There is a local supermarket chain called Pick ‘n Save – it should be Pick ‘n’ Save. One local Pick ‘n Save had a sign in the delicatessen section that read, “Food To Please Your Pallette”. Not only did they have the wrong word, but they misspelled “palette”. I kept wanting to ask the deli attendant for some paint to put on my palate.

      2. What’s the source for your one letter/one apostrophe rule? Seems customary for a single apostrophe to hold its own against several — the way Texans brag “one Ranger, one riot.”

  17. 1. If I were a cashier I would rebel against trying to talk people into buying a product unless it were something I used and enjoyed.

    2. Another pet peeve about apostrophes I have has to with proper names ending in “s”, like Brahms. I’ve seen sentences like this in published books: “My favorite piano piece is Brahm’s Lullaby.”

    2. I’d break the fourth wall and tell them that I was required to talk some stuff up. 🙂

        1. It’s to do with acting. When a character talks to the camera or when actors comment on the play/movie/tv show while acting, that’s breaking the 4th wall.

          1. Ah, je vois! Merci beaucoup. I think I’ve seen a couple of Woody Allen movies where that device is used.

          2. It’s a device that can be extremely effective if used very, very sparingly.

            I can recall an occasion (can’t remember the context) at the end of some TV drama episode where the hero had explained how everything was resolved and the villain turned to camera and said “That’s what they think”. [Fade to black].
            Ouch!

  18. Having talking points for the Cashier in the first place is a mistake. Making a salesman or woman out of the lowest paid schmuck in the store? The sign itself is kind of the point, no?

    The Cashier has enough to do without chatting up sales. What do they pay supervisors and managers for? Oh yeah, to sit in the office on the internet.

  19. There was a discount furniture store on a corner where I waited for a bus to school. In the store’s window with a drawing of a man with a money bag for a head. The sign read, “Mr. Saving’s Say’s Save $$ Here!”.

    Even back then, it annoyed me. Misplaced apostrophe’s are one of my pet peeve’s (especially when I can’t find my favorite Frank Zappa album).

        1. One could if one’s name was Frank Vincent Zappa and one had released sides like Apostrophe, Zoot Allures, and Sheik Yerbouti.

    1. However, apostrophes aren’t only to denote singular/plural, they’re for missing letters, and not just the better known contractions.

      And just because a problem doesn’t come up often, doesn’t mean we should abandon the use of the apostrophe. I can see why a council might do it, but generally I think it’s a bad move.

      1. Apostrophes are officially banned from all placenames in Australia, for ease of indexing and signwriting, but I don’t know if many countries have the same rule (e.g. a lookout named after a bloke called Govett is called Govetts Leap, etc.). It’s an elegantly Gordian solution, similar to the rule in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature cutting all symbols other than the 26 neo-Roman letters from taxon names (the botanists are still allowed hyphens).

  22. A few years ago I was given a book of Paul Krugman columns. They were very interesting, believe it or not, but all the way through I was irritated by the use of an apostrophe in plural dates, as in 1990’s. I’ve since learned this is standard practice at the New York Times. To me, they have a responsibility to get it right.

    1. It’s quite a common style, here, and I prefer it. Of course I grew up with it. (In the 50’s & 60’s.)

      1. The rule I use is if it’s going to make something more clear by using the apostrophe then just use it.

        1. You have just triggered one of my (many) grammar peeves: the loss of the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. I think that clearer is much clearer than more clear, and would you really say “most clear”?

          2. Yes, I would say most clear: “Out of all the lenses I looked through, this lens is the most clear.”.

            You sound like those religious people who claim they are being forbidden to practice their religion when asked not to lead a prayer during government meetings. A comparative or superlative is no less valid simply because the speaker/writer chose to use “more” or “most” with an unchanged adjective. To me “clearer” is harder to say because of the repeating “r”; more clear is much easier to pronounce so this is the style I chose.

          3. Well, I think that clearest is clearest, and overcomes your objection about the double “r” sound. I am quite happy to use “more” and “most” as qualifiers when they sound better, thus I very carefully deprecated the loss of the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.

            Incidentally, why the dig about religion? I am about as hard-core an atheist as you might wish to find.

          4. The way language is processed in the brain, the double-r problem is still there even when you say or hear ‘clearest’ (because the existence of ‘clearer’ is implicit) and even in non-rhotic dialects like Australian (where the final r gets sounded only if run on to the next word and it happens to start with a vowel).
            Some people say it’s a rule that -er and -est are only used with monosyllabic adjectives, but that would be one of those rules that Shakespeare and the KJV had never heard of.

  24. I don’t know which is “grocer”, lack of apostrophes, or pushing products.

  25. As a Brit, I find the word “addicting” more annoying than grocer’s apostrophes. Do all Americans say “addicting” rather than “addictive”?

    1. I encountered “addicting” when I moved from Ontario to Washington State on the west coast, nightglare (and, yes, it jumps out at me too). I can accept it on the grounds that it’s okay to create adjectives from verbs in that was generally, but it’s sort of a shame they don’t use that perfectly good word.

      (Another habit I’ve encountered here: “I wish I would have” to mean “I wish I had.”)

    3. Addicting annoys me as well. My wife uses it this way quite often and I must resist the urge to correct her to maintain domestic harmony.

    4. It’s not merely annoying; it’s nauseous enough to make me nauseated. I’m still fighting rearguard actions against enormousness and enormity, and fortuitous-as-a-synonym-for-lucky, too.

    5. There are others like that, e.g. ‘concerning’ to mean ‘of concern’ (adj.). As a preposition (meaning ‘anent’ [Arch., Scot.]) it’s quite OK of course.

      ‘Comprised of’ is one that I correct whenever possible, but gets used in journal articles all the time. That’s one of my incentives to review more manuscripts, so I can do my bit to stamp it out. (There’s a somewhat OCD-ish guy whose hobby is fixing instances of ‘comprise’ misuse on wikipedia; it’s a big job.)

  26. Try googling Bernard Lamb’s article: ‘Cows Inseminated by Seamen. Errors in the English of Highly Selected Undergraduates’ and be prepared to be shocked!

    2. ‘Cows Inseminated by Seamen’

      I know sailors get randy on long voyages — hence the Royal Navy’s tradition of “rum, sodomy, and the lash” — but that’s the first I’ve heard of one going bovine.

  27. Many years ago I heard a linguist commenting that her greatest wish for a reform of the English language was to get rid of the apostrophe completely. She noted that the purpose of punctuation was to indicate pronunciation. It’s and its are pronounced exactly the same. In spoken and written English, context indicates which form is being used.

    1. Erm…punctuation does an awful lot more than merely indicate pronunciation. The panda who eats, shoots, and leaves also eats shoots and leaves.

      Spoken and written English are best considered two distinct, though closely related, languages. (Read that sentence and consider how likely you’d be to “speak” the commas. And would you change your pronunciation had I not included the quote marks in that last sentence?)

      b&

      1. “Spoken and written English are best considered two distinct, though closely related, languages.”

        Consider how the word “content,” e.g., is pronounced, depending on whether it is a noun or adjective.

          2. I saw him live when I was a kid and he did something with all these noises, possibly combined with his piano playing. Such a cool guy! He always ended by sayinng “Thank you from my bottom to my heart.” We said that a lot en famille;-)

      3. My favorite aunt, an elementary school teacher, used to hold me on her lap while she solved the newspaper crossword puzzle. As she did so, she taught me the letters and their sounds, then how to put them together to make words. By the time I was three, I was able to read newspaper headlines and comic strips. When, as part of my linguistics courses, I studied child language acquisition, I realized that I was effectively bilingual in speech and print. This did result in some problems, though, because I knew many words learned from books that I was unable to pronounce correctly (one particular bugaboo was “chrysalis”). This had some of my early grade teachers wondering if I was deficient – they were unaware of just how advanced in reading I really was.

        1. ‘…I knew many words learned from books that I was unable to pronounce correctly..”

          Know what you mean. First time I ventured “epigone” aloud, it rhymed with a play by Sophocles.

          3. Thanks, Ken. I would probably have said it like Antigone, although who knows if I’ve been saying thst correctly. We have Greek friends who have shown us that we have pronouncing most things Greek wrong: philosophers, mathematicians, playwrights…can’t remember an example off the top of me ‘ead.

          4. But remember, your Greek friends are speaking modern Greek. This Greek is 2000 years old. The pronunciation isn’t the same just as the language isn’t the same. Think how different English sounds and works from Modern English (this includes Shakespearian English/Elizabethan English) to Middle English and Old English (Anglo Saxon).

          6. And the first time I pronounced the Antigone, it sounded like something that was against leaving. I since learned the correct pronunciation.

          7. Someone (a young someone, I should add) puzzled me by using the word “chouss.” I inquired, and it turned out to be chaos.

          8. An English professor of mine once pronounced Don Quixote as “Don Kicks Oat”. It took me a while to figure out what he was talking about.

        2. Bilingual in speech and print, Yes!
          I suspect my first language was actually print, and to this day never use a word unless I know* how to spell it. Whether I know how to pronounce it is of less concern.

          *Very occasionally, mistakes are made.

      4. ‘Spoken and written English are best considered two distinct, though closely related, languages.’

        Vive la différence! (or différance, as Monsieur Derrida spelled it in discussing this distinction between written and spoken language).

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