#15. The “Grocer’s Apostrophe”
Apr 3rd, 2008 by Afroblanco
You’ve seen it on signs. You’ve seen it on menus. You’ve probably even seen it in emails written by allegedly literate people.
Something that looks like this :
“Special today: $1 cantaloupe’s”
or
“Chicken wing’s half price”
or
“All breakfast’s come with home fries and a salad”
Seriously? Leaving aside for a moment the fact that salads are wholly inappropriate as a breakfast food, sentences like this are an affront to the eyes as well as the frontal lobe.
Now, I’m not one of those people who go around correcting the grammar of others. Nobody likes that. However, this error is worthy of mention in that it betrays a complete lack of knowledge of the apostrophe and its purpose. The cantaloupe owns something? The chicken wing owns its price? A breakfast can come? Eeeew.
This is THIRD GRADE stuff, people. Hell, forget about education. Have you ever read a book? Or a magazine? Or a sign written by somebody who didn’t totally have their head up their ass? Surely, after a lifetime of seeing properly-placed apostrophes, SOMETHING must have clicked.
I demand an explanation for this. In the meantime, those who haven’t yet mastered the apostrophe should be banned from all written language, especially anything that will be on display before the general public.
Leaving an apostrophe out can be just as bad, though (especially when marble engravings are involved, as in this picture): http://www.wearethepostmen.com/wp-content/uploads//2008/04/letsplaytwo1.jpg
In that case, the lack of an apostrophe changes the entire meaning. I think the grocers’ errors stem from over-compensation as a result of (as you noted) not knowing the rule. To be safe, they’ll just throw an apostrophe in anywhere, and hope things work out.
Yeah, I guess what bothers me the most is that it’s a situation where an apostrophe is completely unnecessary. I mean, I can understand mixing up the possessive and the plural possessive or even mixing up your and you’re. But using a possessive instead of a plural? That implies a lack of knowledge of both plurals and possessives. Plus, it takes EXTRA WORK to put in the apostrophe. You’d think these geniuses would at least err on the side of laziness.
It’s the sort of thing that probably shouldn’t bother me, but what can I say? It does.
Lists of nouns where *some* things are pluralized with an apostrophe and some are pluralized correctly always leave me dumbfounded. At least make mistakes consistently!
On sale:
Potatoes
Carrot’s
Beets
WHAT.
Along similar lines, I often see quotation marks used for emphasis! What is up with “that”?
“Chicken wing’s half price” could reasonably be interpreted as “The chicken wing is half price”. The others are plain wrong, though.
You leave me speechless. Or wordless. Finally, someone else “CARE’S”. : )
I totally agree. I also can’t stand when grocery stores describe their produce like this:
Today - “fresh” apples.
…so they’re not really fresh?…
Fresh frozen.