This Week in Unnecessary Apostrophes
March 20, 2008 – 9:51 amI like soul food, but I do not like stupid punctuation errors.
Sorry, no matter how good your chef is, you’re still in need of a good proofreader… unless your restaurant is actually owned by a guy named Soul Fixin. If that’s the case, I apologize.
8 Responses
Uhm… that’s not an error. The apostrophe’s one and only use in English is to replace missing letters in a word. In this case it is missing a G as in “fixings.” And yes, even in possessives it is technically replacing a letter, usually an E. It is a leftover Old English convention.
By Cully on Mar 20, 2008
Cully: I highly doubt the owners of this restaurant were cognisant of this when they chose the name of their restaurant.
By Chris on Mar 20, 2008
What, soul food lovers can’t be English majors? I would think anyone fluent in Southern Slang (which is what I associate soul food with)- full of lil’ and y’all and such- would be apostrophe experts!
By ExposedNYC on Mar 20, 2008
umm, cully’s right, and even if the owners proooobably weren’t thinking of the old english convention, they still knew that when you remove a letter from a word, you plug in an apostrophe.
jus’ sayin’.
By boo on Mar 20, 2008
i’m still not goin’…
By fbl on Mar 20, 2008
I didn’t see the error either, but just thinking about a guy named Soul Fixin made me laugh.
By maria on Mar 20, 2008
True story: Sign on a lovely eating establishment near where I grew up in Detroit…
Joe’s Hamburger’s and Shake’s
By Meghann Rae on Mar 21, 2008
Ever see this site? it kills me…
http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/
rock on,
aitch
By Harris Bloom on Mar 24, 2008