The vexed question of punctuation and its wretched abuse has being tormenting me during long dark nights of the soul. Who are these vandals and why do they insist on desecrating the noble world of the Latin alphabet.
The apostrophe - that fine, elegant punctuation mark whose value is ably demonstrated by its unerring ability to assist in marking the possessives of all nouns and many pronouns - is under threat from sinister forces.
You know who you are. The miscreants who - oh, horror of horrors - confuse the apostrophe, the omission marker par excellence - with the right closing single quotation or with the prime, an indicator of measurement in feet or arcminutes.
You vile, vile people. How can you live with th knowledge that you're undermining the very bedrock of the sublime English language. Sit up and listen: When the noun is a normal plural with an added s, no extra s is added in the possessive, so pens' lids (where there is more than one pen) is correct rather than pens's lids.
If the plural is not one that is formed by adding s, add an s for the possessive, after the apostrophe: children's hats, women's hairdresser, some people's eyes (but compare some peoples' recent emergence into nationhood, where peoples is meant as the plural of the singular people). These principles are universally accepted, so please, please, please don't (any chance of a film review? - ed)
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