What really bugs me.

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Spirit_Fire

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Out hunting rogue apostrophes.
I'm always trying to make sure my punctuation and spelling are perfect. When I wasn't sure how to use apostrophes, I looked it up. When to use there, their, they're? I looked it up.

What bothers me is not so much when other people get it wrong (nobody's perfect), but when I see it sctually printed somewhere, like on shop signs or even in the newspaper.

Here are some examples of things I've seen:

1. Apostrophe's used in plural's (those were intentional!). I've seen so many shops with things like Arthur's Pizza's, or Used Car's. I keep thinking 'somebody actually paid money for that sign!' If I was the shopkeeper, I'd send it back to be reprinted! Or if it was the shopkeeper who wrote down what he wanted to be printed, with mistakes in it, shouldn't the printer know enough to correct the mistake before printing it?

2. I've seen a lot of ads like: 'Search 1000's of jobs!'. What this really says is 'Search one thousands of jobs!' not 'thousands' as was obviously intended. But I can't help reading it as 'one thousands'. If you want to write 'hundreds' or 'thousands' then I think you have to write it out in full.

This really gets my goat (hope you understand this, it might be an Australianism). Do other people get annoyed by these kinds of things? Or is there something wrong with me?

Spirit Fire.

p.s. I just had to edit my post. I realized that I wrote apostrophe's in posessives. What I meant was in plurals (posessives are fine). Whoops.
 
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CaroGirl

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Yup, it's annoying

But the reality is that most people just don't care. They don't know the right way and they couldn't care less.

Even more, I hate when I see mistakes in my local daily newspaper. Nobody seems to have any idea about the collective noun. I see things like: "The couple were on vacation." Couple is singular collective noun people, like team or family. It needs to be: "The couple was on vacation." I mean, that's not even a careless error; they actually think it's right.

Anyway, the upshot is, I agree with you, but I try not to let those signs bother me too much. Laugh at it instead and be secure in the knowledge that you'd never do anything so stupid!
 

dante-x

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Spirit_Fire said:
I'm always trying to make sure my punctuation and spelling are perfect. When I wasan't sure how to use apostrophes, I looked it up. When to use there, their, they're? I looked it up.

What bothers me is not so much when other people get it wrong (nobody's perfect), but when I see it sctually printed somewhere, like on shop signs or even in the newspaper.

Here are some examples of things I've seen:

1. Apostrophe's used in possessive's (those were intentional!). I've seen so many shops with things like Arthur's Pizza's, or Used Car's. I keep thinking 'somebody actually paid money for that sign!' If I was the shopkeeper, I'd send it back to be reprinted! Or if it was the shopkeeper who wrote down what he wanted to be printed, with mistakes in it, shouldn't the printer know enough to correct the mistake before printing it?

2. I've seen a lot of ads like: 'Search 1000's of jobs!'. What this really says is 'Search one thousands of jobs!' not 'thousands' as was obviously intended. But I can't help reading it as 'one thousands'. If you want to write 'hundreds' or 'thousands' then I think you have to write it out in full.

This really gets my goat (hope you understand this, it might be an Australianism). Do other people get annoyed by these kinds of things? Or is there something wrong with me?

Spirit Fire.

I agree with you, for the most part. However, I think that presenting a numeric value such as 1000 is more eye catching than the spelled out 'thousand'. The numerical value might have served, though it is now rather mundane, the ends of drawing attention to a message.
 

GrammarScribe

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Nobody seems to have any idea about the collective noun. I see things like: "The couple were on vacation." Couple is singular collective noun people, like team or family. It needs to be: "The couple was on vacation." I mean, that's not even a careless error; they actually think it's right.
That might depends on the style of a particular publication, though. The house stylebook of the magazine I work for instructs us to always treat "couple" as a plural noun, for simplicity's sake. It helps avoid messy subject-verb-agreement problems ("a couple wants to redecorate their house" becomes "a couple want to redecorate their house") while keeping our style consistent.
 

Maryn

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You are among kindrid spirits here, Spirit_Fire!

I'm the sicko who wrote to the car dealership that advertised van's and truck's in the paper and on TV. If they were that careless about English, would they be just as careless about honoring their warranty, or getting me the best price for my trade-in, I asked.

They've never made that particular mistake again.

Maryn, pathetic
 

CaroGirl

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AltoRose said:
That might depends on the style of a particular publication, though. The house stylebook of the magazine I work for instructs us to always treat "couple" as a plural noun, for simplicity's sake.

That might certainly be the case, if they didn't have it occasionally correct in the same publication, sometimes even in the same issue. Talk about style consistency issues!
 

Jordan

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Even more, I hate when I see mistakes in my local daily newspaper. Nobody seems to have any idea about the collective noun. I see things like: "The couple were on vacation." Couple is singular collective noun people, like team or family. It needs to be: "The couple was on vacation." I mean, that's not even a careless error; they actually think it's right.

Maybe the editor is from England? Words like team, couple and family take the plural verb in British English.
 
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Jamesaritchie

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punctuation

Getting it wrong bugs me, as well, but 1000's is the best choce for most ads and signs. I'd say 99.9999% of the people who see it read it as "thousands," and it simply works better for such purposes. What works best is what it's all about.
 

aghast

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1000's is fine in ads and preferred...numerics should always be used in ads to catch attention and to cut down word counts
 

Maryn

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I'm being driven mad by a store named BAGEL'S.

Bagel's what?

Maryn, perplexed
 

Maryn

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OT: rich, you do know how easy it is to insert basic HTML code using find-and-replace, right? You can do it right in notepad or wordpad. Find a tab, replace it with <p>, find a return, replace it with </p>--that's 2/3 of it right there.
 

rekirts

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Maybe the owner's name is Bagel so it's Bagel's store. Heh.

Oops. Somebody already said that, more or less. *Goes back to napping.*
 

kyleh767

In case you haven't already seen this, I think this sums it up quite hysterically:

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