Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Grammar for Bloggers: Possessive or Plural?

Today’s article comes from Autoblog.  Here’s the line that prompted a post:

The economy appears to be swooning, and before we land softly (or crash hard), company’s have begun to circle their wagons and reduce unnecessary spending.

Leaving aside the questionable sentence construction, let’s address the apostrophe problem in the word "company’s".  The correct plural of "company" is "companies".  You can, if you want, use an apostrophe to indicate plurals of letters or numbers: mind your p’s and q’s, x’s and o’s, crazy 8′s, and so forth.  That’s not a hard and fast rule, however; there’s some disagreement among the Masters of Grammar (such as they are). 

Grammar for Bloggers: "Line Up" vs. "Lineup"

Welcome to a snarky new series.  A beautiful thing about the advent of blogging is the availability of so many sources for getting news and information.  The trouble is, many of our friends in the blogosphere have some difficulty with the written language.  This can be a barrier to adoption for the snobbier sections of the community, so I’m here to help.  The goal is not to aggravate or annoy; I’m hoping to provide some tips that will be helpful.

Today’s example comes from Engadget: "Zealots lineup for Jobs’ keynote".  The word "lineup" is always a noun; it could define a company’s range of products, or a viewing gallery of suspects at the local precinct.  When used as a verb, the words "line" and "up" need to be separated.

The apostrophe at the end of "Jobs" is correct; you could get away with "Jobs’s" as well, but I agree with the poster here.  We’ll probably have to get into apostrophes at some point, but not today.