This Week in Unnecessary Apostrophes
I 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.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under Grammar Police on Patrol. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 20th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Cully says: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.
March 20th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Chris says:Cully: I highly doubt the owners of this restaurant were cognisant of this when they chose the name of their restaurant.
March 20th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
ExposedNYC says: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!
March 20th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
boo says: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’.
March 20th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
fbl says:i’m still not goin’…
March 20th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
maria says:I didn’t see the error either, but just thinking about a guy named Soul Fixin made me laugh.
March 21st, 2008 at 10:38 am
Meghann Rae says:True story: Sign on a lovely eating establishment near where I grew up in Detroit…
Joe’s Hamburger’s and Shake’s
March 24th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Harris Bloom says:Ever see this site? it kills me…
http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/
rock on,
aitch