I've never been a strict grammarian. When I was in college, my boyfriend used to type all my papers (reader, I married him!), adding lots of commas, mostly needed. We would wrangle over a few grammatical points, such as the serial versus the Oxford comma, but mostly I was happy to have someone else do the heavy lifting.
It was my husband who first noticed the apostrophe apostasy on the plaque Mark received for winning the New England Championship on Saturday. It states:
CROSS COUNTRY BOY'S CHAMPION 2008
Our niece Rebecca, who was visiting for the weekend, and who teaches in the English department at Cornell College, immediately questioned the errant punctuation mark. Mark left the room during the discussion, thrilled to be a member of a family that critiques plaque copy. Several months ago, he had to listen to his parents go on about an egregious error on Harvard's athletic recruitment questionnaire, which asked for your coaches phone number. Horrors!
Personally, I'd leave out the plaque's apostrophe altogether because it doesn't add anything meaning-wise. As a former copywriter, I find excessive typography distracting and inelegant.
Is anyone still reading?
4 comments:
Ouch!
I hope Mark still treasure's the plaque.
(Ha ha. Hope you just saw my joke.)
I know just what you mean. When that kind of stuff happens to my stories in the paper, I get quite upset. I rant and rave...and of course most readers probably didn't even notice.
Well, off to DFCI...
The other one that gets me is "Woman's Club." Is it really just a club of one woman?
Worst of all is the misuse of "your" vs. "you're."
My word verification is "unfall," which is perfect for So. Cal. because we're having a very unfall day in the low 80's.
Congratulations Mark!!
Uncle George
I can't believe this. I just posted on this on my own blog. Then I clicked on yours and realized that great minds are once again in sync. I "should of" read yours first, and moved on to the question, "Does each student have their pencil?"
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