Genealogy Chat

John A teacher friend of mine told me about a note she had received. Little Johnny had been off school with diarrhoea. Mother had several goes at the word, finished up with Diary Ha Ha, crossed it out and wrote 'the s**ts'. OC HAPPY TO DELETE IF THIS IS FOUND OFFENSIVE - I CAN NO LONGER JUDGE.

Ah, but how many parents / guardians, when writing sick notes for their children, can spell diarrhorea? I'm sure they can smell it, but that's not quite the same thing. J

GENEALOGY - FAMILY HISTORY SEARCH'S, CENSUS'S 99p As found on ebay just now. Oh dear ....

When my son was in year 6 we went to an open day at his prospective High School. I was rather dismayed to see a wall display in the English Department (of all places) entitled in enormous letters 'Example's of our Students Work'! I was then handed a leaflet inviting me to join the 'Friend's of C****** High School'. I declined the invitation... Liz :-)

I once had a screensaver that said 'My pet hate is apostrophe's in the wrong place' ! Pam

Talking of being driven mad I daily face a sign which says The Company of Choices Thats Changing Lives I'm going to get out my big black magic marker soon, I swear I am. OC

You guys might be interested in the book 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation ' by Lynne Truss, if you haven't read it already. 'The title of the book is an amphibology, a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction, and derived from a joke on bad punctuation: A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. 'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 'Well, I'm a panda,' he says at the door. 'Look it up.' The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.' This joke is referred to in the book, but is not quoted therein, to the confusion of some readers who are not familiar with it. A variant of the joke, however, appears on the back cover.' Wikipedia Old fashioned as it might seem, punctuation is vitally important, because it changes the meaning of the words we write. There's a sign on my dentist's wall that drives me nuts. 'even pearlyer whites' it urges, trying to push teeth whitening procedures. It's not even hand written, but a glossy mass produced poster. Shameful!!!

Seen recently at a well known Stationers and Printers: All StationAry items 50% off. Won't be taking them any printing work. OC

Not quite an apostrophe.....but on the radio this morning......Sainsbury are to change a sign in all their shops because of complaints. At the checkouts 'Ten items or less'....to.....'Ten items or fewer' Jean

Clive and Reggie Yes, you are right. I misunderstood what Reggie said. When I read his post more carefully I understood! The disappearing apostrophe on genes - I have had this too, sometimes it seems to vanish into the side of the letter - but it is still there if you put your spex on! OC

There you are, it worked fine :-) Don't know the position on a UK keyboard because I use an Italian one, but it certainly looks like an apostrophe.

Mary: I use the symbol under the at sign - thus '. It seems to disappear. Sod's Law says it won't this time <g>. J

Reggie is right, OC. The apostrophe is not used to form a plural, but can be added to denote possession. In the example you give, the apostrophe is related to possession in both cases: The cat's basket (the basket of the singular cat). The cats' basket (the larger basket of the plural cats).

John, GR doesn't edit out apostrophes. Are you sure you haven't been using the accent key by mistake, as a lot of people seem to do?

So the apostrophe is showing possession - there's no contradiction surely.

Um, Reggie... The cat's basket = one cat with a basket. The cats' basket = lots of cats sharing a basket Surely??? OC

The simple rule is that plurals do not have apostrophes. An apostrophe is used either to denote a missing letter (or letters) or the possessive case of a noun.

OC How many Penny Blacks are needed for a Large Letter? I remember the sad day when PO Telecomms (as it was then) abolished paragraph indentation in letters and other typed documents. We still got specifications typed on Gestetner skins and corrected in that pink nail-varnishy stuff. J

Mark Strictly speaking, a word such as Mr, which is an abbreviation, should be (and used to be, for those of us who are old enough to remember) written M with the r elevated and underlined. But that goes back to the days of old, when an address was indented on an envelope in a sloping fashion. All gone since we went over to American, abandoning our peculiar and unique language in case other English-speaking races found it too difficult. OC

Photo is actually a truncation, and as such, should (strictly speaking) have the full stop after it, as mentioned somewhere above. Mr is an abbreviation and should not have a full stop (although I have often seen one). Mark