Daily Archives: August 5, 2010

On Convention: The Brief Edition

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Let’s say, for a minute, that ‘X’ is some non-harmful action or method or behaviour or idea.

Person 1: “I want to do X”
Person 2: “But, but! You can’t!”
1: “Why not?”
2: “Because!”
1: “Give me a better reason.”
2: “Because that’s not the way it’s done!”
1: “Who says? Maybe ‘the way it’s done’ could use an upgrade.”
2: “But that’s the way we’ve always done it!”
1: “But with the advance of new technology and new generations with new ideas about society and culture, maybe what you ‘used to do’ just isn’t relevant anymore, have you thought of that?” 
2: “But anything new just… just won’t work!”
1: “Why not? It might work better than what we already have.”
2: “It will fail! People will hate it! People will destroy you with criticism! And when it fails, I will be right here to tell you ‘I told you so’!”
1: “You’re just afraid of change. Can’t you see that this is a better way?”
2: “There are only so many ways of doing things, and they were ALL done before! The current way was PROVEN to be the best!”
1: “Yes, by previous generations in a much different society than ours. The world has changed since then. So I’m going to do X anyway.”
2: “…I guess I can’t convince you. You’ll come to your senses eventually, probably after you fail, and realize that you can’t just do X on a whim! Just remember that I warned you.”

Does anyone besides me see how freaking irritating Person 2 is? We stick these arbitrary limitations on ourselves as a society and as individuals, and then wonder why nothing changes? We wonder why governments are corrupt, why our heathcare system is failing (I’m Canadian), why people continue to devour Big Macs and mass-produced fried chicken and cigarettes? We know our systems are broken, but we’re so reluctant to change that we excuse it all by saying “that’s the way it is” or “that’s the way it’s always been” or (the worst) “it’s a fact of life that [governments are corrupt, mass healthcare will never work, people want cheap, easy food, people smoke, etc.]. And if we take these things as facts, anyone else who does anything different (or tries to change anything) is considered an idiot, a hippy, a rebel, or foolish (or all four).

Conventions change from generation to generation. But when these conventions persist as fact, they make society increasingly narrow-minded and rigid. Not to mention, they can land us in some pretty deep s**t (case in point: the government).

On Apostrophe Usage

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(Alternate title: The Spam I Receive Has Better Grammar Than My Corporate Workplace)

This really frustrates me. How many times do I visit an otherwise professional website, only to find that whoever wrote the copy for it had no concept of when to use (and not to use) apostrophes? Specifically, the ‘apostrophe ‘s” combination. People in general know that contractions use apostrophes– I rarely see something like ‘doesnt’ or ‘cant’– but they seem to have no understanding of when apostrophes are used in conjunction with the letter ‘s’ at the end of the word. In my opinion, there’s really nothing as unprofessional as this. The worst part? It’s getting worse, not better! It’s becoming more and more widespread. Are people just not being taught grammar in school anymore?

Here’s a real example, pulled from my employer’s corporate intranet:

Misused Apostrophe

 

 

Do you see the mistake? There should not be an apostrophe in ‘participants’. By comparison, the spam I received in my email inbox this morning not only had perfect grammar (in an attempt to bypass my spam filters, no doubt), it also correctly used words like ‘inconceivably’. Why can random spammers write better English than professional writers?

So for those of you who didn’t catch the mistake above, here is the condensed version of when to use ‘apostrophe ‘s”:

1) DO use it to indicate possession– i.e: Jim’s car, the participant’s boredom, the Jones’ house (be careful of this last one– since the name already contains an ‘s’, the apostrophe is placed after it, not before).
* The exceptions to this are the generic singular nouns (he, she, it); when forming the possessive with these, there is no apostrophe (his bike, her closet, its colour (a wall, for example)).  

2) DO use it to indicate a contraction with the generic singular nouns discussed above– i.e: it’s (it is) warm outside, he’s (he is) a nice person, she’s (she is) out of town. In slang, you can also use other nouns like this to form contractions, but this is rather confusing in written English (i.e: my mom’s (mom is) out shopping), and is more widely used when speaking.

3) DO NOT use it just because a word is plural. ‘Participants’, above, is plural, but in the context of the sentence, there is nothing that indicates a possessive, and a contraction would not make sense (‘on providing participant is with greater self awareness’…?), so an apostrophe should not be used.

 4) DO NOT use it because you’re just unsure. There are plenty of online and offline resources available to you to give you the rules of grammar– there’s (there is) no excuse not to look it up ESPECIALLY if you work for a large company.

 So there’s my rant for the day. Miss Grammar Freak, at your service.