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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
 

Deeply concerned with the maintenance of standardized punctuation in our language?  You've got a pretty good life.  This from Catallaxy::

As regular Catallaxy readers will know, misuse (no, abuse) of the apostrophe is one of my pet hates. On this one, though, I held back on my pedantry because while I knew that "season's greetings" was correct, I wasn't sure why it was right. After all, we don't say "Christmas' greetings" or "birthday's greetings". So far as I can work out, the reason is that this is an expression based on the old genitive case, typically used with time, such as "one hour's delay". It is also true that "seasons greetings" is ambiguous, or perhaps just very generous, in sending me greetings for more than one season.

Anyone who enjoys issues like this will like Eats, Shoots and Leaves:The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss, which has suprisingly become Amazon UK's top-selling book, and is now available in Australia. It doesn't tackle season's greetings directly, but there is a useful summary of when to use an apostrophe which should be compulsory reading for those who went to school in the 1980s and 1990s (and for a certain Catallaxy contributor who regularly muddles his it's/its).

On the other hand, there's something to be said for ee cummings, Don Marquis, and leet speak.


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