east village idiot

intelligent and unintelligible thoughts about life in these five boroughs

This Week in Unnecessary Apostrophes

I like soul food, but I do not like stupid punctuation errors.

soulfixins.JPG

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.

8 Responses to “This Week in Unnecessary Apostrophes”

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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!

  4. 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’.

  5. March 20th, 2008 at 9:20 pm

    fbl says:

    i’m still not goin’…

  6. 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.

  7. 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

  8. 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

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