Parked too close to our place for comfort
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Today in NZ history- 23/08/1920 - New Zealand's first female OlympianViolet Waldron was New Zealand’s first female Olympian, and part of New Zealand’s first Olympic team of four. She competed in freestyle swimming in the 1920 Antwerp Summer Olympics.
- 23/08/1939 - Writer Robin Hyde dies in LondonThe journalist, poet and novelist, born Iris Wilkinson, was one of New Zealand's finest inter-war writers. Troubled by depression, illness and poverty, she took her own life in London.
- 23/08/1947 - Assisted immigration resumes after warThe first draft of 118 British immigrants arrived in Auckland on the New Zealand Shipping Company liner Rangitata. They were among 77,000 men, women and children who arrived from Great Britain under the assisted immigration scheme between 1947 and 1975.
- 24/08/1878 - Wellington steam-tram service openedThe governor, the Marquess of Normanby, formally opened the new service, which was said to be the first in the southern hemisphere.
- 23/08/1920 - New Zealand's first female Olympian
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It’s a worry. Regular irritating apostrocides:
your for you’re
it’s instead of its as a possessive
its instead of it’s as a contraction
Many are calling for the death of the apostrophe, but how do we rhen deal with “the farmers’ cows” vs “the farmer’s cows”?
I blame the Yanks.
🙂
I reckon it all started with their habit of putting periods after abbreviations which real English speakers treat properly. i.e. Where the last letter of the abbreviation is also the last letter of the original word.
Whenever I read Mr. Smith or Dr. Jones or St. Andrew it acts like a verbal portcullis to my continued comprehension.
I disagree that the Yanks are to blame, (although it may be one of the very few things that they are NOT to blame for!) rather it is another one of those insidious changes that have ‘evolved’. Much as it pains me to do so I lay the blame squarely at the door of teachers, both ours and ‘theirs’ (or should that be our’s and their’s? [sorry]). Much as spelling has deteriorated over recent years because of worsening vocabs of our younger teachers, so has grammar. What is most sad is that the lowering of standards has been compounded by our media.
(By the way I am a retired career teacher and principal who (a) did his best to teach word-craft well and (b) employed plenty of young teachers who were the product of classes that didn’t.)
There’s always an irritant…
Lynne Truss’s ‘Eats, Shoots, and Leaves’ book is worth reading on the subject of grammatical irritants. Particularly on the subject of misused apostrophes.
I’m also getting pissed off by people putting the possessive apostrophe by itself at the end of a singular word that ends with ‘s’. The correct way to do it – shown above in this post – is to write Truss’s, not Truss’. However, it would be correct to write “The tomato trusses’ colour was red.” For some reason, the Dominion newspaper does it the wrong way and some ridiculous constructions result from their policy.
My current beef – I’m hearing it all the time on radio and TV – is people not understanding when you should use ‘between’ and when you should use ‘among’. It seems so obvious. I’m a stickler on this, though I do concede that there’s no real need, in terms of comprehension, to have more than one word. But the fact is, that we have separate words and should use them.
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