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[Sean Mirrsen]

I've already pointed it out. He seems to prefer it that way. Hypocrite.

[Lord Shonus]

A personal crusade of mine is the proper use of apostrophes for singular nouns ending in the letter "S."  If Thomas loans you his shoes, they're Thomas's shoe, not Thomas' shoes. They don't belong to a couple of guys named Thoma.

[Aqizzar]

There is one little matter of grammar that I've been fighting my own one man war to change over the years.  The placement of punctuation when dealing with quotes.  The Hammurabi Code of Grammar dictates that no matter the situation, no matter the use, if you've got punctuation of any kind following a quote mark, it goes inside.  I don't write like that, especially if I'm just putting quotes around one word.

Were I less punchy I'd write a rambling example, but screw it, you all know what quotes look like.  Me, I say the comma goes wherever it best preserves the emphatic meaning of the sentence structure.

[Starver]

A personal crusade of mine is the proper use of apostrophes for singular nouns ending in the letter "S."  If Thomas loans you his shoes, they're Thomas's shoe, not Thomas' shoes. They don't belong to a couple of guys named Thoma.

Certainly I will say "Tomassez", so I tend to go for the equivalent spelling.  And whil not all style books necessarily agree on the "s'" or "s's" issue, it seems that the universal exception is that biblical names.  i.e. It's always "Jesus' shoes", (for "jeezuzez shoes").

(BTW, was the earlier-mentioned "The Grocers' Comma" another name for the later-mentioned "Grocers' Apostrophe", or do people actually try to indicate a word,s possessiveness and plurality by (incorrectly) comma,s as well?  Sheesh.)

And, for the record "one PC, several PCs" is my policy on pluralising acronyms (if not "P.C.s", under certain circumstances) and, no, you (i.e. the people who try to wriggle out of it) can't claim that the apostrophe in "PC's" is there as a contraction, substituting for the letters "omputer".

My own non-orthodox apostrophe use is "ones".  All the 'special' pronoun possessives (his, hers, its your our, theirs, and whatever else I've forgotten) are non-apostrophe (and sometimes non-'s') so "belonging to one", the indefinite pronoun should also be apostropheless.  And yet apparently it isn't.  Of course, I accept it remains in all other cases, e.g. "There has been much debate about One's status as a prime number" and "Calculating 1's-complement on-the-fly is more trivial than 2's-complement, but the latter is considered necessary for proper binary arithmetic".

You know, earlier on in this thread I was going to say "Don't ask me about apostrophes.  Looks like I still fell into that trap.


Oh, and:

I've already pointed it out. He seems to prefer it that way. Hypocrite.

No, it was originally a simple typo, then left in as a one of my deliberate sacrifices to the God Of Pedantry, as noted.  Oh and having pointed that out, I've left another typo in this one and left in a dubious compound word rather than re-write.  I don't want to anger the Gods.  (See my entry on Atheism for my true feelings on that subject.