Saturday, September 15, 2007

Spell Check Is Your Friend

In my rush to publish my usual foolishness, I noticed that I spelled "unnecessary" wrong in my last post...I hate spelling mistakes.

No really, it irks me.

But you know what irks me even more than that????

The improper use of the apostrophe...yeah, turn off the lights and call the law, here comes a rant.

I saw a sign at a car dealership that read: 4 New Honda's For Sale

Are you serious?

Here's something I stole from Everything2.com:

Some rules for apostrophe use:First, do not use apostrophes in plurals, unless you intend to show possession, in which case you would use it at the end. "I've got lots of problem's" is grammatically incorrect. There's no contraction or possession here, so no apostrophe.

Second, do not use an apostrophe when you are showing possession using a gender-neutral pronoun (e.g. "it"). It is not correct to say "That stupid bird left it's feathers all over the cage floor." This spelling ("it's") is only acceptable as a contraction of the words "it" and "is". This is probably the most difficult rule to remember, unless you know why.

And finally, never use an apostrophe to form a verb in the present-tense singular. Many times I have read "Jimmy love's Janey", and unless Janey is the sole property of Jimmy love, then this is just another example of poor grammar. But then many people today don't understand the parts of speech either.

This now concludes the Hoity Toity, High Falootin', Uppity Bitch portion of our show......

Ironically, for the first 10 years of my life, I had a REALLY hard time spelling the word business...damn, that was a hard one.

1 comment:

AtYourCervix said...

I am so with you on the apostrophe squad!! Use them correctly people!! Don't overuse them, or use them in the wrong places!!

Another pet peeve of mine is there/their/they're.

There - means OVER THERE

Their - shows possession

They're - they + are

End of rant.