Fictionlet

[the_gneech]

Nibbling on tuna-on-a-cracker, Greg said, "People who can't tell 'their' as in 'belonging to them' from 'there' as in 'over there' really? Huh. I'd have thought the good old grocer's apostrophe would be what drove you the most nuts."

"Well yeah, that drives me nuts too," Brigid said, talking over the music. "But not as nuts as the whole their/there/they're trifecta."

"Eh, I could care less about that," said Treville, but was roundly ignored.

"What about you, Mr. Writer?" said Brigid. "Surely a wordsmith such as yourself must have a linguistic pet peeve or twelve."

"Well, I'm usually pretty laid back about it," said Greg. "The whole don't-wrestle-with-a-pig thing, y'know? But I think the one thing that really makes my teeth grind is when people latch on to some linguistic construction that makes absolutely no sense and that they'd never say in a million years except they heard it on television or something and think it makes them sound hip, so they repeat it over and over."

"I know, right?" said Treville, but then couldn't understand why the two of them just stared at him in cold silence.

-The Gneech

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Comments

[kylet.livejournal.com]

Brigid needs to understand as long as their are idiots on the internet, there never going to totally correct they're errors with that trifecta ;-)
[Cripes, I had to WORK to make that wrong].

Hey, *I* say that :-p

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Don't let Greg hear you say it! ;)

-TG

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

Brigid is my hero.

At least most people these days are getting the two/to/too trio correct. But the other one that drives me absolutely up the wall is the do/due duality.

-=TK

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

> "Eh, I could care less about that," said Treville, but was roundly ignored.

I like what you did there.

[kylet.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I had missed that! Yes indeed :-)

[the-sedgwicks.livejournal.com]

I think that maybe college is where one starts to misplace grammer. I found my grammer gets worse the more classes I take. (I think it has more to do with human interaction.)

Love this fictionlet.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear it! :D

-TG

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard the phrase "Grocer's Apostrophe" before, but it's a keeper.

There's a place called "Cars & Trucks For Sale By Owner" down El Camino from us. On the building itself, that's how it's spelled. A few months ago, I was taking a walk, and there was a sign painter up on a gantry, painting the tall sign high above the sidewalk.

As I watched in horror, the painter added apostrophes to "Car's & Truck's".



I choked, and had to stop myself from running across six lanes of traffic screaming, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

[exatron.livejournal.com]

One of my parents' neighbors takes the grocer's apostrophe to the next level and adds it to store names that don't end in s, yielding words like "Target's" and "Kroger's".

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that's a "Grocer's Apostrophe", even though it seems to happen a lot to grocery stores. It's making a possessive out of a name, not trying to apostrophate a plural.

Oddly, I find myself doing that with some store names -- I've never done "Target", possibly because it doesn't sound like a person's name, but I'm often guilty of "Lucky's" for "Lucky Supermarket" and "Thrifty's" for the long-defunct "Thrifty Drug Store". When I lived in Texas, yeah, I called it "Kroger's". It just SOUNDS wrong without the "s".

I'm also guilty of "Penney's" instead of "JC Penney", but I have historical precedence there.

There are also store names that DO end in "s", and seem like they SHOULD be possessives: "Walgreens" comes to mine. It looks WRONG without the apostrophe, but that's how the chain spells it these days -- even though their COMPANY name is "Walgreen Co.". What's the opposite of a "Grocer's Apostrophe"?

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

You could have sauntered across and casually kicked the ladder out from under 'em...

-TG

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Alas, it was one of those trucks with a basket on the end of a hydraulic arm (the name escapes me right now).

Don't think it hadn't crossed my mind.

[radbaron.livejournal.com]

Cherry Picker?

Oh, and he made the dollar sign backwards as well $