Eats, Shoots, And Leaves…
Excerpted from the always-right-on 50cups.com
The “plural apostrophe” (e.g. no dog’s allowed, sofa’s for sale, UGH) is running rampant these days, and it’s not just my imagination. It’s so wrong that I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could make such a mistake. I hate it when people dismiss it with, “Oh, not everyone’s a grammar freak.” Grammar? You think it’s an issue of grammar? I hate to break it to you, but if you can’t spell “dogs,” you’re illiterate.
In the same vein, what’s up with people that pronounce words with perfectly good short vowels as long: “ee-ssential, ee-lectronic,” and the one that always kills me, “proe-ject?” As opposed to an amateur ject, I suppose.
It’s a stiff, schoolmarmish way of speaking, as if one learned the word from a book and not by hearing it, but it’s widespread (the CBC’s Shelagh Rogers talks like this); is it an example of linguistic hypercorrection? In any case, it’s peculiarly unique to Canada, from my experience.
And of course, let us not forget the mother of all horrible back-formations, “orientated?”
March 12, 2003 12:17 PM
