My mother, who taught English for a while, was told not to correct grammar and spelling for precisely this reason. She was very keen on good English, so that hurt a lot.
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I have never come across that, at all. But it would be nice to standardise - so we know whether there are many SBLs or the sentence is to with something belonging to an SBL.
This made me think of the phrase ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’, and that led me to this useful article on that and the possessive form:
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Not just posts. News sites on the internet seem to have no thought about what they are writing. The result is that I am often unsure what it is that they meant to write.
Even (gasp) the BBC suffers from this.
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I think it’s often that smartphones, on which people are often writing, frequently add in an unwanted apostrophe. In particular iPhones almost always put an apostrophe in its (although not that time, as it happens).
It’s annoying when one notices, but it’s even more annoying when one doesn’t. Another word that frequently gets given the apostrophe treatment by iPhones is well, which often gets changed to we’ll.
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I was taught that either is OK, though Jones’ is probably best.
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Or, as any fule kno, “Bollox”.
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Which reminds me of the school joke. A boy goes into the cake shop and asks to buy a gattox. The snooty shopkeeper replies, it’s not gattox, it’s gateau. To which the boy replies, call that a gateau? Bolleaux.
Good point David.
I’ve been using an iPad with a cover with an integral keyboard more in the last week or so, and have had some very odd typos, jumpy cursor movements or message/reply inadvertently disappearing. I think it’s something to do with auto-spellcheck and accidentally touching the screen when I use any ‘top row’ characters.
Should that not be get them wrong. 
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I know the thread has been started about the incorrect use of the plural apostrophe but it tickled the linguist in me. Many languages don’t have plurals. There are a few linguistic commonalities among most Western languages that you can’t imagine life without… until you learn a language that doesn’t have them and realise they are totally superfluous to accurate understanding.
Plurals are a great example. The lack of them just seems fundamentally wrong and vague. But actually, the reverse is true, one versus any other number greater than one is just about as vague and useless as it gets.
“apple” versus “apples”
Two or two-million “apples”, the latter tells us nothing remotely useful. Many languages would simply require you to specify an actual apple (“this apple”) or provide a number (“five apple”).
When learning German and Japanese, my tutors often raised the truism that one cannot truly master any other language until they become a true master of their own. Consequently, my English vastly improved as a result of learning other languages.
That said, I hate picking peoples’ grammar to shreds in informal settings. Least because my own fails to measure up on first read. Subconsciously dropping plural “s” and the largely redundant indefinite article “a” being the most common casualties of typing English right after speaking Japanese.
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I used to be an editor so I have just looked at one of my reference books - The Oxford Guide to Style - and there are almost five pages on the use of the apostrophe. Here’s an example to give you a taste of the complexity of the guidance.
Mars’ spear but Mars’s gravitational force.
The difference is driven by the guidance that an apostrophe alone may be required in a poetic context.
The problem for writers is that while there are rules - some uses are just wrong, as shown in posts above - in other contexts there is only guidance. Guidance is a primarily a matter of convention and conventions can change through usage.
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Your last sentence: I believe the RAF used to be incredibly strict on that particular issue.
I don’t believe so, no. ‘It’ in this context is referring to the process of pluralisation, rather than to the plurals themselves.
Sounds more like an exercise designed to exclude those who did not attend private school more than anything else.
Who care’s
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Unlike the Navy which, if memory serves, once ran an advertising campaign in the 70’s under the banner ‘Join the Navy and Feel A Man’…
Ah, the age of innocence.
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HH,
I’m very glad that you have raised this issue. Language matters.
English speakers have both an opportunity and a challenge, given that our language is so compex and nuanced - possibly because of its myriad roots. Consequently, we should be tolerant of SOME errors. I am a former universuty lecturer and my colleagues and I often found that the students who were the best writers were also the best thinkers - and vice versa (hey, get that English language!). To use a specific example, some students preferred to use an apostrophe “sprinkler”, rather than bother with correct usage.
Good syntax, spelling, punctuation, etc. give clarity to meaning, but as a resident of France, I applaud those who contribute to the forum in their second language. Personally, I say “Viva Google Translate!”.
Proof-reading is another area fraught with difficulty and even the most careful can make errors - me includad!
… and now a rant. Why have some people (including some in the BBC) stopped using the word “that”?
Brian D.
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Or they …if from the West Country.
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