> The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English greengrocer’s apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an ‘s’ is mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun (“a kilo of potato’s”).
Grocer's apostrophes annoy me, along with words like "advices" (advice is an abstract noun and can't be plural, like "happiness") and "learnings" (use "lessons" instead).
"Learnings" is more than annoying corpspeak though. It's a word so old that you can find usage from time it was spelled "lernynges" ("lernynges whiche Cathon gaf to his sone")
Let's double-click on that: There's value in expensive signalling, and sometimes the expense is an intentional (or at least tolerated) lack of aesthetics.
That one's a bit mean given that data does have a distinct plural, it just happens to be spelled the same because whoever came up with english didn't really grok the phonetic alphabet.
Data can be used as a plural or as a mass noun. When it is a mass noun it is treated as singular. Hence we say "data is hard to come by" versus "data are hard to come by."
Also datums is the plural of datum when it is used in an engineering sense, which is the most likely place one would still encounter it.
>That one's a bit mean given that data does have a distinct plural, it just happens to be spelled the same because whoever came up with english didn't really grok the phonetic alphabet.
Isn't 'data' already plural, with 'datum' being the singular of the plural 'data'?
I think it makes sense, like a scientist might think of their codes as discrete things, because one code was written for each experiment. The work-product is the experiment, the codes are just little things that make it happen.
Nonsense. Informations has long been used in English. I have before me a letter by Albert Einstein to Norbert Wiener regarding a young Kurt Eisemann, in which Einstein writes, "From his letter enclosed here, you will get informations about his life and studies before he arrived here." And in the Princeton translation of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens one finds, "The Eleven also bring up informations laid against magistrates alleged to be disqualified". Informations is perhaps a bit obscure but it's perfectly valid.
Well, for what I red, Einstein primary language stayed German all life through (Information/Informationen). And he learned English rather late in life, starting at 34 apparently.[1] And while not speaking German, he was more likely to practice some Italian as a spontaneous expression desire (informazione/informazioni) and did practice French well enough to give a lecture in this latter language (information/informations).
Those plural forms are sometimes referred to as European continental dialect of English and do not raise questions here. If we, Europeans have to use English as lingua franca, we can and we will adapt it to our needs same way as Americans, Afro-Americans or Indians did. So my advice: just get used to it.
Edit: cultural possession of language is nonsense, it belongs to all speakers, native and non-native alike. Germans must get used to foreign influence on their language too and Ukrainians should stop fighting Russian language and start writing their own rules for it (what can piss Moscow more?)
The Dutch may have some "rights" to adapt English. They're #1 in non-native English proficiency for 5 years in a row and surpassed Canada (considered native speakers) on overall English proficiency some years ago.
One point of debate is that English in the Netherlands has become mostly American English over the last decades due to media influence. While originally "school English" in the Netherlands was British English.
I actually go full-descriptivist on this and it erases all the posturing. If you're a speaker of English, native or otherwise, and you say or write something purposefully and don't consider it a mistake then it's correct.
Wether other people will join you in your new usage is yet undetermined but also doesn't really matter. AAVE is the perfect example of this happening large scale in the real world.
There are multiple ways to define “correct”. I tend to favor: having the desired effect. This results in a “correct” that is highly flexible, but doesn’t label anything that one happens to choose as “correct”.
A quarter of the population of Canada is in Quebec where the only official language is French and most people would not be considered native English speakers.
I had never heard of that, but Wikipedia has similar examples in "Euro English" [0], though there it is because similar words exist with s in other languages. I wonder if something like "advices" exists in another language?
I think you can say it does? Ie in other languages, the plural of advice (which in English is advice, "I gave him a lot of advice") is spelled differently(with the plural ending). From my personal knowledge, in Russian advice is совет and "advices" (or advice pl.) is советы. In Spanish, advice is consejo and there is a plural consejos. This can probably be also translated (in both cases) as "tip" and"tips" or something similar.
“Learnings” has a potentially useful nuance, referring specifically to whatever it is one took away from a lesson. I know the word “lesson” itself can also cover that meaning, but “learning” is more specific and given how widely it’s used, that specificity appears to be useful in some circumstances.
I would normally expect "the grocer's apostrophe" to refer to a single grocer and "the grocers' apostrophe" to refer to a plural group of grocers, which I assume is what you intended.
The term "(green)grocer's apostrophe" refers to the misuse of the apostrophe in plurals, which seemingly occurs disproportionately on signs in those shops. It's ironic that it contains a tricky-to-place apostrophe. Should the meaning be "the apostrophe of the greengrocer" or should it be "the apostrophe that greengrocers misuse"? Either works fine. For the same reason, I always have to check whether it's "mother's day" or "mothers' day" because... it's both!
I’ve never heard “advices” (in the US). Maybe it is a continental Europe thing? They may have surpassed even us, at the art of inventing new words and spellings to annoy the English.
Or even "it's going to have to deal with it" — though hopefully the pronoun refers to a pet or farm animal of some kind, as referring to a human as "it" is dehumanizing.
Grocer's apostrophes annoy me, along with words like "advices" (advice is an abstract noun and can't be plural, like "happiness") and "learnings" (use "lessons" instead).