Grammar Patrol: I'll red-ink your fingers so thoroughly they'll fall off!

Contributed By:Dorothy Nevils

So many folks fancy themselves honest. They’d swear on a stack of Bibles, King James included, that you can trust them with anything, that they’d never, ever, ever take from you.

Don’t believe it! Some of the nicest folks are, in a word – or two… or three – stomp down, honest-to-goodness thieves, plain and simple. They will steal your s off! They do it to me all the time!

It’s not that I’m a pushover. I protest loudly. I jump up, fists balled into tight knots, and shout, “Leave my s alone!”

They look at me derisively. “You’re in the church!” they whisper. “Why are you cussing?”

“Dang!” I mutter to myself, my only friend. If I’d kept the name my daddy gave me, I wouldn’t be going through this! There was not a single s in my given name. I should’ve kept it!

Why is it so hard to understand? If I own something, it belongs to me, whole me, all of me, whether you use my first name, the one my parents gave me, or the last name, the one I picked up a few years back. It’s Dorothy’s car. Do you agree with that? Now, if we use my borrowed name, Dorothy Nevils, is it not still my car? Then, logically, it is Dorothy Nevils’s car. The apostrophe plus s, written ’s, shows ownership of a car by Dorothy Nevils! Dropping the s means changing the spelling of my name!

Let’s try another one: I fell asleep last night listening to the bird’s chirping. I fell asleep listening to the birds’ chirping. In this case, we have a single bird in sentence one, and more than one bird in the second sentence. We added an s plus an apostrophe because of the added birds.

Folks also do that “switching duties thing” with families. They insist that apostrophes work overtime if families live together, which makes absolutely no sense to me! Families should live together, but what do folks do? They throw an apostrophe in there for NO reason at all! For example, there are four families on your block and each family has a different last name. So, what do you do? You treat them like nouns… because… they are nouns! Let’s see how that works.

We have four families with four last names: Brown, Bush, Hardy, and Williams. Don’t you dare reach for an apostrophe! I’ll red-ink your fingers so thoroughly they’ll fall off! This is not about ownership; it’s about households! They are the Browns, the Bushes, the Hardys, and the Madisons, and I don’t care how many squiggly red lines Word throws at you. Grammar existed before there was a gigabyte, or before “auto” became a corrections officer! They. Don’t. Know. Jack about grammar!

Be strong. No matter how many times grammar check tries to coerce you into reaching for an apostrophe to turn the Browns into Browns’, Bushes into Bush’s (or Bushs’), Hardys into Hardy’s, or Madisons into Madison’s, hang tough! Don’t let’em!

Oh, by the way, next Sunday is Mother’s Day, and, if you’re wondering why it’s not Mothers’ Day, the answer’s simple: “Mother” is singular – you only get one. So, if you still have yours, don’t forget to remember her.

Story Posted:05/06/2017