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In Australia, it is quite simple, if ungrammatical and plain stupid. A bureaucratic body ( the Geographical Names Board) decided back in 1966 that no Australian place names should contain possessive apostrophes. This means we are stuck with wrong-looking (and, in my view, plain wrong) names such as Devils Marbles (thankfully, we can use the
I have never been a fan of the explanation that apostrophes are used to show ‘possession’; I prefer to use ‘association’. After, Saint Patrick doesn’t own his cathedral; he is associated with it, because it is dedicated to him. A dog doesn’t own its collar or the bowl it eats from, but the dog’s collar
Many people think about apostrophes in the same way they think about getting stuck in a patch of cactus: they’d rather not. But possessive apostrophes for plural words and names are relatively simple (certainly compared with singular personal names). There is straightforward two-step process: Step 1: Add an apostrophe after the end of the plural
Ancient and modern names The goddess Venus is an example of ancient name but is Venus Williams considered an ancient or a modern name? If you read grammar reference books, you will see that a different rule applies to what are called ‘ancient’ names and sometimes to personal names that end in s, x or
For most words, if they are singular (they refer to one thing only), the rule is easy: add ’s. This applies whatever the final letter of the word is: Susan’s advice, the box’s lid, jazz’s beat, the bus’s driver. Remember: the apostrophe is nothing to do with making something plural (more than one) or singular;
The elegant and under-appreciated semicolon has just two uses: instead of a comma, it separates long items in a list (but not in dot-point lists); it also can be used in place of (not as well as) and or but to join together two short sentences into a longer sentence. (In technical terms, a semicolon
The simple answer (for words that are always hyphenated) is to check in a dictionary: if a word is always hyphenated, it will be listed. If the word you are looking for isn’t there (for instance, game-plan), the odds are in favour of it in fact being two separate words (game plan). There is another
No and no. In Australia, the widespread convention is that each item in a dot-point list starts with a lower-case letter; you can think of each point as ‘finishing’ the sentence that introduces the list. You only need to finish a point with a full stop if the point contains more than one sentence, otherwise
In a word: yes. But there is a qualification: you shouldn’t do this too often. The reason is nothing to do with the words and and but themselves but with the group of words they grammatically belong to (coordinating conjunctions). As the name conjunctions suggests, the role of these words is to connect things and
Welcome to Apostrophes, Etc. In my first post, I thought I’d tackle one of the most common questions about apostrophes. It’s is always an abbreviation for it is or it has, in the same way that he’s is an abbreviation for he is or he has. It’s, despite having an apostrophe, has nothing to do