Ah, before you react, I want to emphasize that I am not a grammar police. it’s just that for the past years, the past months and the past several days, I’ve seen this in my news feed on Facebook.
I don’t want to act like a “contrabida” and correct them because they are my friends. There are times though that even the tenses are so glaring, really quite annoying to read. Long before those trolls by the present administration have lorded it over Facebook and some of them were banned this year, I’ve seen these, not just wrong grammar but wrong choices of words. They could have written it in Tagalog better. Shall we say, it’s “nosebleed” reading it at all.
They usually add that apostrophe + S to regular plural nouns. Here’s the simple rule.
A plural noun is a word that indicates that there is more than one person, animal place, thing, or idea. When you talk about more than one of anything, you’re using plural nouns. When you write about more than one of anything, you usually use the same word, simply adding an s, es, or ies to the end
Do not, I repeat, do not use an apostrophe + s to make a regular noun plural. Nouns ending in -o can add either -s or -es in the plural, and some can be spelled either way. With nouns that end in a consonant or a single vowel plus -f or -fe, change the -f or -fe to -ves: For those ending in y, you change y to ies.
I often see this: friend’s. They use it as plural form. Even if English is just our second language, it is quite annoying to see it.
Well done, Arlene. The language is suffering badly, and in another 100 years, I fear it will be unrecognisable. (No ‘Z’ in proper English. 🙂 )
Best wishes, Pete.
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Thanks Pete. In another 100 years, it will be a mangled language.
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Most English people don’t fully understand apostrophes
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English 101 Derrick. back in high school we had teachers who were so good in teaching English.
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I must admit, apostrophes can be tricky. My big stumbling block is punctuating in or out of parentheses and brackets. I am usually too pressed for time to go look it up as I’m writing, and so I just wing it and hope no one notices. I sometimes go back over past posts and find glaring errors that I didn’t notice at the time. Oh well…I correct it and go on. Maybe it gives people a chance to feel superior to me and I make their day.
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Even those plural forms of some nouns are tricky I must admit. It’s like distinguishing the difference between an alumna, alumnae, alumnus and alumni. But if you take them to heart, it is easy.
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I think I will always struggle with the punctuation in parentheses and brackets though…I must look it up. 😊
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That’s nice! We make mistakes in our writing once in a while.
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Don’t get me started! I used to carry on every year with my students about its and it’s.
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It is so simple to understand and to remember right Elizabeth?
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So I thought!
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🙂
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I do this sometimes and I have no idea why. It’s so odd, Arlene. My brain or my fingers just add that darn apostrophe. It doesn’t bother me when I’m reading comments in general or posts by non-writers, but I hope writers try to proofread their work for silly grammar mistakes. They can be very distracting. 🙂
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Distracting yes especially when you are used to reading blogs that are well-written.
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True indeed! Thanks for this write-up, Arlene!
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Thanks!
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