Parked too close to our place for comfort
Today in NZ history- 28/09/1899 - New Zealand answers the empire's call to arms Premier Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon asked Parliament to approve an offer to the British government of a contingent of mounted riflemen to serve in South Africa. Amid emotional scenes, the members overwhelmingly endorsed the motion – only five voted against it.
- 29/09/1862 - New Zealand's first professional opera performance Dunedin's Royal Princess Theatre was the venue for a performance of Donizetti's Daughter of the regiment by the visiting English Opera Troupe, supplemented by local performers.
- 29/09/1947 - Greymouth beer boycott provoked West Coast publicans soon regretted increasing the price of a beer by 1d.
- 30/09/1878 - Great Flood hits South IslandThe ‘Great Flood’ of 1878 killed at least three people and thousands of animals as it swept across the southern South Island
- 28/09/1899 - New Zealand answers the empire's call to arms
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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