a fuctionalist turns Prescriptivist April 30, 2008
Today I lost my mind on Twitter and pointed out some often misused words & punctuation marks. For posterity, I will enumerate them again here, having wiped off the overtones of condescension and annoyance.
1. Apostrophe use: some simple guidelines.
- Apostrophes do not mark plural. Do not use them to mean more than one of anything.
- Ex: cars NOT car’s; CDs & DVDs NOT CD’s & DVD’s.
- Apostrophes are not used to mark possessives in pronouns.
- Ex: “Poor dog, its tongue was hanging out.” vs. “It’s time to leave.”; “Whose book is this?” vs. “Who’s going to the show?”
- Apostrophes are used to mark possessive on nouns.
- Ex: “Yes, I have Mary’s phone.” or “The car’s tires need to be rotated.”
- Apostrophes are used to contract the verb “BE” as IS.
- Ex: it’s = it is; who’s = who is
2. Who vs. Whom: when and why.
- The –m in WHOM is a leftover from the regular use of the dative case in the past. Same roots as the –m in HIM. This means very little to most. Just remember that
- WHOM is only used after prepositions:
- Ex: To WHOM it may concern; For WHOM the bell tolls.
- In every other situation, WHO is the correct choice.
3. Irregardless is not a word. It’s a redundant construction. Don’t use it
4. Relevancy is not a word. It’s a redundant construction. Don’t use it.
5. For any questions on spelling, I recommend Dictionary.com. Use it. I do.
Hear hear! Glad to know that someone else cares about the ubiquitous abuse of apostrophes. I’m not the only one who it drives crazy.
OK OK you’ve wiped off the overtones of condescenscion and annoyance. And the whole thrust of this class was looking beyond the standardization of language. I can really dig that.
But damn, seeing so many signs, flyers, memos, and other things where people *just don’t get it* on, especially the apostrophe thing, your vs. you’re, their vs. they’re, etc, really does wear on me.