"I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar" - NY Times — Page 4

Actually, Kringas, it's in a film, not in an AP story, so it's correct. And, if the AP ever writes about "Bridget Jones's Diary," it has to write it that way, because it's part of a title (even though my Firefox spellcheck is now scolding me for having written "Jones's"). It's kind of like theater/theatre: AP style is to always use theater, unless it's part of a proper name that uses theatre.

The New York Times, which has it's own style, actually used to be (and may still be) much more convoluted when it comes to the singular proper noun ending in s rule. The basic is to use s' or s's depending on how it's pronounced. So, if you say "Bridget Jones-es Diary" or "Phyllis-es post," you'd use s's. For others, like, "The Golden Girls scriptwriters," you don't say "Golden Girls-es," so you'd just use s'. And then there's a bunch of other exceptions, like if there are preceding syllables with an "s" sound, like Kansas' laws or Arkansas' cities.

I read recently that the apostrophe might just disappear from the written word eventually anyways. Er, anyway.

Gah, no! I make far too many embarassing typos. I mean, embarrasing typos. Or is that embarrassing?

you might as well except it.

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Of course I did. Christ, I never said I was impervious to making typos. Quite the opposite. Some people have a very phonetic way of thinking and are more prone to typos with homonyms.

Updated On: 11/1/07 at 12:33 PM

I would say neither "Bob and Rob, the Grease scriptwriters, are good script writers" nor "Bob and Rob, Grease's scriptwriters, are good script writers." I think repeating the phrase script writers (whether as one word or two) is clumsy and redundant.

Updated On: 11/1/07 at 12:46 PM

Number C:

I would say neither "Bob and Rob, the Grease scriptwriters, are good script writers" nor "Bob and Rob, Grease's scriptwriters, are good script writers." I think repeating the phrase script writers (whether as one word or two) is clumsy and redundant.

I completely agree, totally.


Number D:

You might say the following:

I wasn't talking about you. I wasn't talking about I me myself (???), either.


p.s. I could/should have said: One might say ...

I need Lisa Simpson's grammar robot, Linguo!

Lisa: Just testing.
Linguo: Sentence fragment.
Lisa: "Sentence fragment" is also a sentence fragment.

ETA: P.S. - "NUMBER" A? Since when are letters numbers?

If I put a scientific calculator into a base-12 number system, it uses "A" and "B" to represent the "numerals" for the digits equivalent to 10 and 11 in our usual base-10 system. Like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, and then 10 (actually 12 in base-10), 11 (13), 12 (14), etc. up to 1A (actually 22) and 1B (actually 23), then repeating to 20, which is actually 24.

Augh! Now its it's moved to math!

But in your case, you're just making a list. I mean in that context, why are letters numbers? Letters can STAND for numbers, but if you're just calling something "Number A," that doesn't really make much sense.

They don't have a use. They're imaginary. HA!