[Ads-l] Droppng of _'s_ in writing

[Laurence Horn]

> On Sep 28, 2019, at 8:58 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Over the past dekkid, I've come across possibly tens of thousands of
> instances of Possessive Singulars written as _[word]_ in environments
> wherein you'd expect to see _[word]'s_. This loss of _'s_ is "standard" in
> BE. But, I've seen so many written instances of it that I've begun to
> wonder whether white writers might also, for unknown reasons, be dropping
> _'s_. I haven't noticed any instances of the loss of _'s_ in spoken white
> English, except in the case of the infamous borrowing from BE, _baby
> daddy/baby mama_, instead of, e.g. _baby's dad/baby's mom_.
> Anyway, not to belabor the point, I got an email on the local,
> this-county-only network with the heading,
> "Is this somebody lost cat?”

I’d like to think this was written by someone who wanted to leave it open as between “somebody’s lost cat” and “somebody lost’s cat”, i.e. a cat belonging to somebody who was lost.  

Naaaah.


> A quick check revealed the writer to be a white person from Swoyersville, a
> neighboring town that's 99.22% white and 0.10 black.
> So, at least one white person unlikely to have been influenced in any way
> by black speech in his daily life drops _'s_ in his *writing*.
> What up with that?
> 
> 
> 
> -
> 
> -- 
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org