In line with my usual policy of giving credit where credit is at long last due, I congratulate the New York Times on its recent tacit admission (see previous posting) that decades, being plural by their nature, are properly rendered in text as “1960s and 1970s” rather than as “1960’s and 1970’s.”
The Times’s previous insistence on apostrophes incorrectly denoted possession. Thus the apostrophe would only be correct if one were to write something like “the 1960s’ most representative spokesman was Paul McCartney.” Purists of the most ethereal sort, such as myself, would even insist on writing “the 1960s’s,” which rhymes with “six teases.”
“The 1960s’s” is hard to say, true enough, but no harder than what the tinker said when the countess wondered how he intended to mend her pots:
“Are you copperbottoming ’em, my man?”
“No’m, I’m aluminiuming ‘em, mum,”
Getting back on track here, I await with baited breath for the Times to discover that one does not reign in one’s impulses any more than one reigns in a horse. But I am not so optimistic as to expect its editors ever to be disabused of the notion that children are not bussed to school any more than are they are bused by their loving mothers as they leave for it.
In a properly ordered world, the little tykes receive busses before boarding buses.
What of the serial comma, though?
I am one to use it when necessary to show separation which might otherwise be ambiguous, as in, "I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand, and God."
Otherwise I don't like it, as it breaks the flow. "I had a bowl of cereal, some fruit and a cup of coffee for breakfast."
Posted by: whig on June 22, 2007 3:38 PMHow is this ambiguous? My parents were Ayn Rand and God.
Posted by: Jerry Doolittle on June 22, 2007 6:03 PMI've removed thousands of those apostrophes over the years. I doubt this change will make a perceptible improvement in the manuscripts I see over the rest of my career.
In newspapers and on blogs, I see two or three "reigning in" spellings for every "reining in," and the error always makes me cringe. At least it isn't "raining in."
And Whig, use the serial comma and avoid wasting time considering whether your list might be ambiguous. Supposedly, newspapers skip it to save space and ink.
Posted by: Joyful Alternative on June 22, 2007 8:01 PMNewspapers can save time and ink by not using all those inappropriate apostrophes, instead.
Personally, I've been pretty pissed off at the way the NYT has become so loose with punctuation.
These are the same people who were so damned conservative about their style book that they waited decades to start using "Ms." when appropriate.
I wrote them a very snooty letter once when they adhered to this moronic rule in an obituary where they actually misstated the wife's name because they could not bear to use the "Ms." that was proper there. Interestingly, it was not long after that that they finally announced that they would no longer ban the use of "Ms." from their pages.
But then they started getting all weird, like when they went through a period of writing about "Edwin Meese 3d" instead of "Edwin Meese III" - an unpalatable wrongness. I'm so glad they stopped that.
And now - I'm sure because they can't be bothered to pay proper editors/re-write folks to amend material that columnists send them via e-mail - they are using quotation marks instead of italics for book, movie, and album titles.
It makes me crazy, but still not as crazy as the fact that their political reporting and analysis is so damned in-groupish that it looks like the kind of thing that, 20 years ago, would have been mimeographed because the number of people it would interest wasn't great enough to justify more than a couple-few hundred copies.
Posted by: Avedon on June 23, 2007 6:28 AMGood to hear you're also having an apostrophe problem over there in the States.
In Germany it's similar, only the other way round. Our grammar doesn't know this apostrophe denoting possesion, but lately we are getting all kinds of "Rick's Cafès", "Mother Hubbard's Underwear" and so on.
Since we only have one kind of genitive for all kinds of things and people, this would read a bit like "the street's corner" in English.
It's called an Anglicism over here, so perhaps one might accuse the NYT of Anti-anglicism.
But this double-essing as in busses certainly is a Germanism!
Posted by: Peter on June 23, 2007 8:55 AM