Steven M. Schweda wrote:
From: Ger Hobbelt <[email protected]>
On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]> wrote:
Here is a patch to your patch:
[...]
plural, not possessive.
Thanks for the correction. It's appreciated!
Hey. Don't give up so easily. While it's possible to find backing
for almost any opinion involving an apostrophe, a rule like "plural, not
possessive" is much too simple to be reliable.
It wasn't a rule, it was a guideline.
However, the sentence:
"The no's resounded loudly"can be read either as possessive or plural,
although if
your indicating possessive I think the proper thing would be to
capitalize, as such:
"The No's resounded loudly"
Frankly it's a terrible example sentence whatever you mean because if spoken
out loud, it sounds like "nose" as in snot, so the image is of a chamber
full of
people blowing their noses.
The original lines in the patch are a bit different as neither can
really be read as
possessive.
As for "word used as a word" I'll leave you to ponder the
meaninglessness of that
phrase. It's definitely not in common usage.
However, whatever you end up deciding, it needs to be consistent among
the entire
text - if your going to do this "word used as a word" thing, you better
check the
rest of the text.
Everything's complicated. Trust no one. Especially not a native
English speaker. As Count Aristid Karpathy once said, "The English do
not know how to speak their own language. Only foreigners who have been
taught to speak it speak it well."
Well, nobody has really explained why the shift from "Olde English" ever
happened
with any degree of believability, which is why that joke is apropos.
Ted
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