re: Eats, Shoots & Leaves page 3

There's a question mark at the end of the sentence, Skitt, that has no place being there. No?

True, but is that the error (or is it errors) that is being alleged?

"in the same category as", but what do *I* know? :-)

Christopher
My e-mail address is not 'munged' in any way and is fully replyable!

Adrian Bailey infrared:

Apparently there was a brief period in the 17th or perhaps the 18th century (I'm no good on dates) where a lot of people believed in that rubbish, and came up with "Henry his wives" as a sort of back-formation. The origin of the possessive apostrophe was far enough back in history that many people didn't know about it.

I gather that something similar is now happening in Dutch. (But I don't speak Dutch, so I welcome corrections.) The way I've heard it, some people now naturally say things like "Janz'n hond", which literally means "Jan his dog". Correct modern Dutch would be "de hond van Jan" (the dog of Jan), but if you go far enough back in time "Jans hond" (sans apostrophe) would have been correct. With the genitive case fallen into disuse, it appears that people are spontaneously reinventing a genitive.

Peter Moylan (Email Removed) http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au (OS/2 and eCS information and software)

Game, set and match!

Come now. You can't make game and be set at the same time.

International Match Points, that is.

Indeed.

Mark Brader "He added a 3-point lead" is pronounced Toronto differently in Snooker than in Typography... (Email Removed) Liam Quin

Truss's affirms her love of punctuation by recourse to a story she tells of listening to a radio program in ... grammatical errors in pieces of prose." Apparently, on cue, one of the contestants would interrupt to deleivery to call "tautology".

If you hurry, you can catch last Friday's transmission of "Many a Slip" (a rebroadcast of a program from 1978) here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/friday /
Today being Friday, it is probably going away sometime in the next 24 hours (but it looks from the schedule that it will be replaced on the "Listen Again" page with another episode that is being broadcast today).

Roland Hutchinson Will play viola da gamba for food.

NB mail to my.spamtrap (at) verizon.net is heavily filtered to remove spam. If your message looks like spam I may not see it.

(snip)

Apparently it's the case that the possessive apostrophe was initially ... then Elizabeth her troops, would have to be: Elizabeth'r troops.

I'm sorry to hear she says all that. Our FAQ says otherwise. An excerpt from a longer article about the ... Bill Bryson entertaining for the general public, but willing to tell any good yarn whether or not it's true?

Haven't read the book, but a posting on rec.arts.books.reviews suggests that Truss is debunking rather than bunking:
Removed) In passing, she casts doubt on the widespread belief (urban legend?) that the use of the apostrophe to
indicate a possessive derives from a contraction of "his", as in "John his book".

(snip)

Apparently it's the case that the possessive apostrophe was initially ... then Elizabeth her troops, would have to be: Elizabeth'r troops.

I'm sorry to hear she says all that. Our FAQ says otherwise. An excerpt from a longer article about the apostrophe:

Your response reminds me of something I said in my topic "my first year on usenet" a little while ago. I learn something useful every time I visit. Prompted by the "oy" responses, I went back to reread the passage on which i had relied. I now realise that careless reading has led me to misrepresent Ms Truss's view on the matter.

So with a mea culpa, I reproduce her words:
"Some historians of grammar claim, incidentally, that the original possessive use of the apostrophe signified a contraction of the historic "his"; and personally, I believed this attractive theory for many years, simply on the basis of knowing Ben Jonson's play Sejanus, his Fall ... but blow me if there aren't differences of opinion. There are other historians of grammar who say this Love-His-Labour-Is-Lost explanation is ignorant conjecture and should be forgotten as soon as heard." (p39)
My apologies are offered.
cheers
Chrissy

I'm afraid it sounds like she's in the category with Bill Bryson entertaining for the general public, but willing to tell any good yarn whether or not it's true?

Has it been generally established that Bryson is unreliable to the extent that he's justifiably held up as a yardstick in this way? I know he's claimed like many others that the exception-proves-rule thing uses "proves" in the sense of "tests", but is he really SO bad?

Matti

I'm afraid it sounds like she's in the category with ... to tell any good yarn whether or not it's true?

In order to preserve playfulness I haven't looked this up; but if anything I'd guess that the s of his was itself ultimately a genitive ending.
Mike.

BTW, it's amazing what Google comes up with if one enters (without the quotation marks): "pneumonic help remember"

What on earth possessed you to try it?
Edward

The reading group's reading group:
http://www.bookgroup.org.uk