Grant Day James

Someone once told me that I know very little about grammar because I was educated in the 70s (note the lack of apostrophe), when the education system decided that churning out highbrow grammar weirdos wasn’t the way forward.

But even little old me, with limited knowledge of Split Infinitives and the like, can see that the English language is being smashed online. Initially, I was a bit upset about it, but I figure it’s evolution. One of the great things about the English Language is that it’s a robust beast and will organically reshape itself as users apply it to all sorts of new media - whether that’s online or on smart phone. Hey, who hasn’t used expressions like ‘tomoz’ and ‘c-u’ etc due to lack of time or sheer annoyance with the little keyboard on the screen?

Of course, some things are just plain wrong and will never be anything but. Personal hates: ‘I would of called you, but I was busy’ or ‘your a great friend’. There are many more no doubt, and some that probably annoy other people a lot more.

However, there are some things that we (a few of us here at GDJ) think could do with a bit of assistance.

For instance, one of our clients is Mazda. And the difficulty with the word ‘Mazda’ is when it becomes a plural. We always avoid the word ‘Mazdas’ as a plural because it looks… well, just wrong. And we never use it in radio ads as it also sounds odd! In fact, we actually end up rewriting sentences to avoid the plural. So instead of putting ‘Plenty of Mazdas to choose from’, we’re likely to say something like ‘Plenty of Mazda models to choose from’. That got us thinking about all kinds of words like Mazda that become plurals and how people will insert an apostrophe in there to help digest the word. Of course, it could be that they’re just confused about apostrophes and are chucking them in everywhere blindly. But let’s just assume for the moment that when people insert one, they’re doing so because things like 70s and 80s looks better as 70’s and 80’s. Now while that may look a bit more digestible (mmm… debatable), it’s obviously also wrong as it turns the word from a plural into a possessive.

Now this use of apostrophes in plurals isn’t new. It’s a disease that’s seen all over the place in lots of countries. Shop windows, TV ads, Press ads, newspaper articles. Everywhere.

So we at GDJ have been thinking about the insertion of something other than an apostrophe to indicate a possessive. Sure, you could argue that it doesn’t require ANYTHING. But like I said above, English is robust… why not create something that indicates plurals where a plural looks unusual in the printed form? Can’t we evolve to help people out who are making mistakes on their shop windows, TV ads, Press ads etc?

But before we unveil this solution, if you’re at all interested in this topic (most likely not) and would like to suggest your very own punctuation/insertion to take the place of an erroneous apostrophe for possessives, please let us know!

An asterisk perhaps? An em dash? The floor is yours!