108 thoughts on “When will they ever learn?: Misplaced apostrophes”

  1. Of course the funny part is that “panini” is already plural in Italian (un panino, due panini) but I suppose one must add an “s” (without the apostrophe) if customers consider it singular (“I’ll have “a” panini, or “a” biscotti, etc.).

    2. Thanks, I had forgotten I had grokked that panini is plural but was flustered about the singular … and hadn’t time to google it just then!

      A forgotten itch scratched. Aaah!

    3. Similarly, “graffiti” is plural; the singular is “graffito”.

      Anomalies sometimes crop up where loan words are involved. The borrowed term often changes number, gender or other features, or preserves a feature from the source language that does not occur in the target language. One example I remember is that when German borrowed the Inglish word “baby”, the English plural ending was preserved, giving the anomalous “das babys”.

      1. Hate to be a stickler, but in German, it’s either singular “Das Baby” or plural “Die Babys”.

        1. In Dutch, a number of words (possibly loan-words, I’m not sure) are correctly pluralised with an apostrophe-s, and baby is one of them. So you’ll see signs saying “pizza’s”, “taxi’s” and so on, and just have to come to terms with the fact that they’re correct!

          1. I am an angliciser -if English adopts the word it is absurd to follow the logic of the loan word’s origin. Stadium – stadiums, arena – arenas etc. You cannot expect English speakers to know or care what the rules are for Italian for example.
            🙂

          2. Well, since some of us /do/, that seems to be a “little people” argument …

            I wouldn’t mind panino/paninos (paninoes?), but panini/paininis (which Auto-Correct strenuously objects to!) is just rebarbative.

            /@

      1. OK – let ius say “panin” singular – “panins” plural then – that should satisfy pedants.

      2. You probably get half a sandwich. I generally don’t joke like that with wait staff because they could take offence and they handle my food.

  4. As a recovering HS & Middle S English teacher with almost 30 years in the trenches, I cant wait for the total disappearance of the apostrophe. In fact, Ive unilaterally banished it from my own writing (when I remember–old habits die hard).

    1. I think texting might be helping you’re cause!

      (Sorry about the “you’re” I couldnt help myself.) 🙂

    2. Wasn’t there some philosopher type who founded a group devoted to “Death to the Apostrophe?” My memory said Bertrand Russell, but Google disagrees.

    3. “Ive” ?

      I can understand wanting to lose the possessive apostrophe, but the ‘ in “I’ve” fulfils a quite different function, it indicates missing letters. As such, it’s highly functional (IMO) and shouldn’t be lightly omitted.

      cr

    1. As immortalized by Terry Pratchett, although I see from your link that he didn’t come up with the term. I don’t think that anyone else, however, has the speech of actual grocers reproduced using this convention.

  9. Shouldn’t it be wine bottle’s and sake bottle’s, just for consistency’s sake (or consistency’s wine)?

  11. im resigned to john dentingers opinion above i teach college writing the apostrophe nay all punctuation is shit

    1. That’s what I thought too, but the Pannini possess who? The Catholic God? That would make sense.

    2. Exactly what I was going to say. Each special is the one belonging to that day, so the apostrophe is correct.

      If the day in each case was just a heading, you probably wouldn’t pluralise it.

      1. Yep, that day’s special. Maybe not what was intended, but they should be given the benefit of the doubt.

      2. You’d only pluralise it if it was a regular special every Monday.

        My initial impression was that that was the case, and the apostrophe’s had been added in error; but on reflection, I agree with jahigginbotham, the benefit of the doubt applies.

        cr

      1. Well, he’s got something against his husbands if he calls them “things” anyway.

  14. The sign is arguably correct with and without the apostrophe…it depends on how you interpret the role of the day of the week.

    The title of the board is “Specials”, so if you interpret “Monday” as modifying “Specials”, then “Monday’s Specials” is OK.

    If you interpret the sign as “Specials on Mondays”, however, then no apostrophe.

      1. Ah, right. I just thought he was more offended by the beer’s, rather than only offended by the beers.

  15. It also drives me nuts that ‘panini’, the plural of ‘panino’ is used as a singular noun in bad English. So “panini’s” is a double dumb.

    1. Sure, but do be sure to check your server’s face after you ask for a ‘panino’ or a ‘biscotto’. Once, just for kicks, I ordered the bruschetta with the correct pronunciation (the whole point of the ‘h’ is to make the ‘c’ hard, like a ‘k’). The server looked at me with pity, and said, “Oh, you mean the bru-sh-etta.” 🙂

      1. Drives me NUTZ!! ( which I might be on my way to, anyhoo). You beat me to the brusketta and panino bit. The bruschetta is kind of confusing because the Italian is the opposite of German. My daughter always rolls her eyes when I pronounce things “properly”:-). I am also bugged when Anglos say parmeshan, trying to sound Italian. Either say parmesan or parmigiano, unless you’re Tony or Carmela Soprano. Then you say zitt’ and manigott’ etc.

        1. You haven’t lived until you’ve pissed off the Dutch with the pronunciation of “Gouda”.

  18. Why and how did the owner of the store in the bottom photo actually manage to get it _right_ for “Herbs”?

  19. Similarly, the owner of the store in the top photo actually got it _right_ for “Bottles”: twice. What determines when they get it right and when they get it wrong?

  21. The ancient Romans didn’t need punctuation, why should we? It’s always amused me that the “Bible Code” crowd ran all the words together without spaces, when the change of one letter or word in a different copy would change the location of ALL the subsequent letters.

    I’m not so concerned about apostrophes, or even punctuation, for that matter- what concerns me is the number of “educated” people who can’t spell anymore: texting, of course, is a major cause of this in the younger set (“Wer R U?”), but I see many comments on news articles that would look a lot more as if they’d been written by someone intelligent if the writer had even bothered to use spell-check.

    1. Comments on the Internet are one thing, but yeah, it’s kind of depressing how many grammatical errors you can find in official publications from businesses and government officials. And they’re not limited to chalkboards in cafes; you can even find them in glossy brochures!

      1. Took several bids on some roofing work a few years ago: one was a slick, glossy brochure that said on its front cover,
        “OFFICAL ESTIMATE”

    2. The Romans used all sorts of punctuation. They didn’t bother with capital letters unless they were writing a proper noun. Their writing looks like crap only on stone monuments when they use capitals and jam everything together. Regular writing didn’t look this way.

      2. A book of Caesar’s Gallic Wars was one of my Latin set books. I remember its very plain sentence structure. Was that because of a relative lack of punctuation?

        1. I think Caesar was just that kind of writer. His Gallic Wars are often used in introductory Latin courses. But, Latin is highly infelective. That means there is no need for word order and you can be creative with how you write and speak. Cicero is a good example of this. I’m not advanced enough in Latin to truly appreciate this bit Cicero did manipulate Latin to make his arguments stronger.

  23. I like to see a “greengrocer’s apostrophe” and I don’t think anyone is confused by them. Why not get rid of the things completely? I mean we don’t use them in speech, though I’m open to contradiction.

  24. When I was in high school, the bus I rode passes a discount furniture store that had a window display poster of a man with a money bag for a head. In his hands was a placard with the current sale specials, introduced with the phrase “Mister Saving’s Say’s”.

    This is not a new thing. As Trevor pointed out above, there is a name for this common error, and if I’m not mistaken, it was noted at least two hundred years ago.

  28. “Beer’s” is obviously wrong.

    But “Monday’s”, “Tuesday’s” and “Wednesday’s” could well be correct possessive apostrophes if the sign is construed to mean
    “Specials: Monday’s: ….”

    i.e.
    “Monday’s specials” etc.

    cr

  30. By the way, Darwin himself was not a great speller! Read his letters & notebooks to discover more. One could argue that the language has never settled down & accommodated itself comfortably to the loss of inflections. That is why ‘on’, ‘in’, ‘at’ etc are so hard to use ‘correctly’ I might venture. Train company announcements often say “The train is arriving in” where I would say “at”. And so on…

  31. I wonder if any proper research has been done on this (and other common mistakes as well I guess).

    I’d be interested to see what kind of patterns there are, because I don’t think apostrophe misuse is random. For example, I suspect people have vaguely formed “rules” like, maybe if the word ends with a vowel I should add one. I bet they occur more often with short words too. Does it make a difference whether it’s an abstract or concrete noun? There might be all sorts of interesting statistics to uncover, and you can be sure the newspapers would pick it up as well.

  32. A funny thread–as are most threads that deal with the apostrophe. However, I will still maintain that after the best efforts of every English teacher on the planet, only a very small group of English writers knows how to use it correctly. So . . . kill it, give it a decent burial, and, find something else, to laugh, at–like, the comma!

  33. My all time favorite was a hand written sign in the window of a bargain basement type shop which read:

    Quart’s watches £10.

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