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

Kate Svoboda-Spanbock katesvobodaspanbock at GMAIL.COM
Sun Sep 29 04:16:00 UTC 2019


Maybe it’s a combination of auto-correct and the fact that the apostrophe is on a different screen if you are typing on a phone? 

Kate Svoboda-Spanbock
Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 28, 2019, at 6:19 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

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

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



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