 |
 | Home | Contact Us | FAQ | Search & Site Map | Link to Us |
 | Sign In | Join | Other 45 Sites in Network |
| HomeDiscussion GroupsEnglish UsageBritish EnglishESL Teaching Learnglish.com Contact UsLink To UsSearch & Site Map |
Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009X apostrophe ?
Headline from the New York Times web site: "White Sox¹ Buehrle Pitches Perfect Game" From which I deduce the Times thinks the x in Sox takes an apostrophe to form the plural possessive. I wonder how think it should be pronounced - "sockses" ? Any thoughts?  Signature"If you can, tell me something happy." - Marybones >Headline from the New York Times web site: > [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > >Any thoughts? I don't like the practice of putting an apostrophe only after singular words that end in S on an S-sound to represent the possessive. Triply so if people are expected to say sockses, because then the spelling doesn't match the pronunciation, and afaic, the whole origin of writing was to record words spoken or words one hears in his head, which are a lot like what is spoken. Of course this is unusual, because, despite the spelling, sox does mean socks. It is plural, and plural words that end in s are made possessive just by adding an apostrophe. So I guess what you quote is okay. SignaturePosters should say where they live, and for which area they are asking questions. I have lived in Western Pa. 10 years Indianapolis 10 years Chicago 6 years Brooklyn, NY 12 years Baltimore 26 years > Headline from the New York Times web site: > [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > > Any thoughts? It is exactly the same as would be "White Socks' Buehrle". SignatureCordially, Eric Walker, Owlcroft House http://owlcroft.com/english/ Eric Walker filted: >> Headline from the New York Times web site: >> [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > >It is exactly the same as would be "White Socks' Buehrle". Is Buehrle a White Sox or a White Sock?...r SignatureA pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optometrist asks whether you see the glass more full like this?...or like this? > Eric Walker filted: [...] >>It is exactly the same as would be "White Socks' Buehrle". > > Is Buehrle a White Sox or a White Sock?...r A question interesting but here irrelevant: the name of the team is simply a cute spelling of "White Socks". I don't believe I have ever heard the term (or its analogues, such as Red Sox) used in a noun sense for an individual. My lady, who pays closer attention, tells me she has once or twice heard reference to "a White Sock"; that's fairly awful, but I suppose "a White Sox" would be worse. SignatureCordially, Eric Walker, Owlcroft House http://owlcroft.com/english/ Eric Walker filted: >> Eric Walker filted: >[...] [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] >A question interesting but here irrelevant: the name of the team is >simply a cute spelling of "White Socks". Cute, but official..."White Socks" is by definition wrong.... >I don't believe I have ever heard the term (or its analogues, such as Red >Sox) used in a noun sense for an individual. My lady, who pays closer >attention, tells me she has once or twice heard reference to "a White >Sock"; that's fairly awful, but I suppose "a White Sox" would be worse. ObPastReference: who's your favourite Flock of Seagull?...r SignatureA pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optometrist asks whether you see the glass more full like this?...or like this? >> Eric Walker filted: > [...] [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > attention, tells me she has once or twice heard reference to "a White > Sock"; that's fairly awful... Except, presumably, for a one-legged player - which rather proves your point. Regards Jonathan > Headline from the New York Times web site: > [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > > Any thoughts? Whatever you're doing to make your text intelligible still isn't entirely working. The salient term in your post looks like Sox followed by a superscript 1, which makes it trickier than it need be to understand your point. SignatureJohn Dean Oxford > > Headline from the New York Times web site: > > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > superscript 1, which makes it trickier than it need be to understand your > point. I can only apologize, again. It's clear that the problem is linked to copying and pasting from certain sites - and the New York Times is obviously one of them. And yet, when you quoted me, the superscript 1 showed up as an apostrophe in my newsreader... Signature"If you can, tell me something happy." - Marybones >>> Headline from the New York Times web site: >>> [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > And yet, when you quoted me, the superscript 1 showed up as an > apostrophe in my newsreader... Go, as they are fond of saying, figure. Out of interest, I copied a sentence from the current NYT and reproduce it below, first pasted directly and second pasted into Notepad then recopied and pasted here. How do they look to you? For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe's primary source of protein. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe's primary source of protein. SignatureJohn Dean Oxford >Out of interest, I copied a sentence from the current NYT and reproduce it >below, first pasted directly and second pasted into Notepad then recopied [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] >For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the >Kamayurá diet, the tribe's primary source of protein. Those are identical in my newsreader. SignaturePeter Duncanson, UK (in alt.english.usage) > Out of interest, I copied a sentence from the current NYT and reproduce it > below, first pasted directly and second pasted into Notepad then recopied [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the > Kamayurá diet, the tribe's primary source of protein. They both look the same, and there's an accent ( A acute ???) on the a in Kamayurá Signature"If you can, tell me something happy." - Marybones <snip> > Out of interest, I copied a sentence from the current NYT and reproduce it > below, first pasted directly and second pasted into Notepad then recopied [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the > Kamayurá diet, the tribe's primary source of protein. In both copies the apostrophe (presuming it started out as one; the site does appear to use typographer's punctuation as a rule) has been converted to a vertical quote -- whether by your browser, your system clipboard, or your news client I wouldn't venture a guess. It should be displayed correctly on practically any system, belonging as it does to the common ASCII subset of the various Latin text encodings. SignatureOdysseus >> For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the >> Kamayurá diet, the tribe's primary source of protein. [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] >displayed correctly on practically any system, belonging as it does to >the common ASCII subset of the various Latin text encodings. The ASCII character set does not contain a "vertical quote". It contains an apostrophe represented by the bits 0100111. Among implementations of ASCII there are some fonts which use a small vertical line to represent the apostrophe, some use a curved line, some use a diagonal line, and some use a ball with a curved tail. This is a choice made by your font designer, not dictated by ASCII. I suspect that such micromanagement of character appearance would have been unimaginable to the designers of ASCII. However, if any form of the apostrophe is "wrong", it must be the vertical one. The vertical apostrophe is the only version that doesn't appear in any of the actual standard documents that define ASCII. As further evidence, there was suggestion early on that the apostrophe could also be used as an acute accent (print a letter, backspace, and overstrike with the apostrophe). So where do people get this completely unsupportable idea that ASCII apostrophes are and must be vertical? Unicode-pushing ASCII-bashers have enacted the following plan: Step 1. Create Unicode fonts which contain a vertical apostrophe in the ASCII-compatible range, and a curvy apostrophe in the ASCII-incompatible range. Step 2. Encourage the creation of text which makes use of the ASCII-incompatible apostrophe, by promoting the adoption of new tools that convert ASCII-compatible apostrophe to ASCII-incompatible apostrophe at every opportunity. Step 3. Lie to everyone about the reason that the ASCII-compatible apostrophe in a Unicode font is less "pretty" than the ASCII-incompatible apostrophe. Tell them that ASCII mandates the vertical apostrophe. When ASCII text including the ASCII apostrophe appears next to Unicode text including the ASCII-including apostrophe, 2 groups of users see 2 different things: People viewing with a Unicode font see the ASCII apostrophe as an ugly vertical one, and the ASCII-incompatible Unicode apostrophe as a pretty curvy one. The intended result is that they'll think the author of the ASCII text did something wrong. People viewing in ASCII will see the ASCII apostrophe as whatever form the font designer chose - which will usually not be vertical because ASCII fonts normally don't contain ugly vertical apostrophes! But they'll see the ASCII-incompatible Unicode apostrophe as some kind of unintelligible characters. The intended result is that they'll feel an urge to "upgrade" to a Unicode font which will make the Unicode text more readable. The vertical ASCII apostrophe is the Unicode industry's Big Lie. Don't fall for it. If your Unicode font doesn't display the apostrophes in ASCII text as reasonable-looking apostrophes, complain to the font designer. Tell them that Unicode's first few characters are supposed to be ASCII-compatible, and that an ASCII-compatible apostrophe doesn't need to be, and probably shouldn't be, a vertical tick mark! Don't blame ASCII. ASCII didn't make that mess. Unicode did. SignatureAlan Curry >Don't blame ASCII. ASCII didn't make that mess. Unicode did. Eh? Typewriters did, a century before ASCII, by merging the open and closed single quotation marks and the apostrophe all into one character. Remember, ASCII was created as an encoding for teletypewriters, so it was concerned only with the characters on a typewriter. IBM turned it into a modern mess by not including separate open and closed quotation marks in the extended ASCII character set built into the hardware of the PC. ¬R \\\ http://users.bestweb.net/~notr/bsinl.html /// T E A M W O R K Together Everyone Achieves More Worthless Objectives, Reducing Knowledge MC wrote... >> Whatever you're doing to make your text intelligible still isn't >> entirely working. The salient term in your post looks like Sox [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > And yet, when you quoted me, the superscript 1 showed up as an > apostrophe in my newsreader... The Mac moves in a mysterious way... I suggested before that you try switching MIME on; as it says on the page from the Newswatcher site I referenced earlier http://www.smfr.org/mtnw/docs/TextEncoding.html#Text_Encodings_and_MIME "... you are strongly recommended to send articles containing MIME information, because then the character set information is included in the article headers, and other news clients will be able to decode and display the article properly." It's worth a try, I think. SignatureNoel > MC wrote... > [quoted text clipped - 21 lines] > > It's worth a try, I think. I just switched it on. Here's a test paste from the New York Times which contains quotation marks... +++ Mr. Obama placed calls to both the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the man who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, two days after saying police had ³acted stupidly² last week in hauling Professor Gates from his home in handcuffs. Mr. Obama said he still considered the arrest ³an overreaction,² but added that ³Professor Gates probably overreacted as well.² +++ Signature"If you can, tell me something happy." - Marybones >Mr. Obama placed calls to both the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and >the man who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, two days after saying >police had ³acted stupidly² last week in hauling Professor Gates from >his home in handcuffs. Mr. Obama said he still considered the arrest ³an >overreaction,² but added that ³Professor Gates probably overreacted as >well.² The footnotes seem to be missing. SignatureSteve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk <snip> > > "... you are strongly recommended to send articles containing MIME > > information, because then the character set information is included [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > overreaction,² but added that ³Professor Gates probably overreacted as > well.² Your message now has a header saying that it's in ISO-8859-1, which doesn't include curly quotes. My MT-NW works around this somehow (possibly recognizing its own dialect, so to speak) and displays the marks correctly, but Mozilla Thunderbird shows superior numerals. (I haven't seen you try a left single quote, so I will here¹.) Having looked into this a little closer, I now doubt my earlier suggestion that MT-NW posts in MacRoman by default. In that encoding the apostrophe is in slot 213 (0xd5), which would come out as Õ (O-tilde) in ISO-8859-1 (or Windows-1252) if left as is, but the superior 1 others are seeing (and I, in Tbird) is in slot 185 (0xb9). If you want to use characters from extended sets, choosing "Unicode UTF-8" in MT-NW's Languages panel ought to help. Some older newsreaders still won't understand them -- but again, it could be worth a try with the present audience. SignatureOdysseus > <snip> > [quoted text clipped - 33 lines] > still won't understand them -- but again, it could be worth a try with > the present audience. Well, most of the above is all Greek to me - but thanks for putting in the time to investigate it! Could someone who had problems with the codes before report on whether or not they saw the quotation marks (curly or straight) in the passage I pasted? Signature"If you can, tell me something happy." - Marybones >>>> "... you are strongly recommended to send articles containing MIME >>>> information, because then the character set information is included [quoted text clipped - 38 lines] > or not they saw the quotation marks (curly or straight) in the > passage I pasted? I see superscript twos and threes. SignatureSkitt (AmE) > > Could someone who had problems with the codes before report on whether > > or not they saw the quotation marks (curly or straight) in the > > passage I pasted? > > I see superscript twos and threes. Thanks. Signature"If you can, tell me something happy." - Marybones >> > Could someone who had problems with the codes before report on whether >> > or not they saw the quotation marks (curly or straight) in the [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > >Thanks. I see those superscripts, too. Skitt uses OE 6, and I'm using Agent 5. SignatureRobin (BrE) Herts, England >> In article >> <copespaz-338E6A.23154224072009@news.eternal-september.org>, MC [quoted text clipped - 44 lines] > or not they saw the quotation marks (curly or straight) in the > passage I pasted? I didn't see ant quotation marks - just superscript 2's and 3's SignatureJohn Dean Oxford >Your message now has a header saying that it's in ISO-8859-1, which >doesn't include curly quotes. My MT-NW works around this somehow >(possibly recognizing its own dialect, so to speak) and displays the >marks correctly, but Mozilla Thunderbird shows superior numerals. (I >haven't seen you try a left single quote, so I will here¹.) Ah -- THAT'S where OETHE comes from -- it was meant to be `the'. SignatureSteve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk > Ah -- THAT'S where OETHE comes from -- it was meant to be `the'. Ya think? Signature"If you can, tell me something happy." - Marybones >> Ah -- THAT'S where OETHE comes from -- it was meant to be `the'. > > Ya think? ITYM OETHINK SignatureJohn Dean Oxford >> Ah -- THAT'S where OETHE comes from -- it was meant to be `the'. > >Ya think? It's obvious, innit. SignatureSteve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk > > > Headline from the New York Times web site: > > > [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > And yet, when you quoted me, the superscript 1 showed up as an > apostrophe in my newsreader... Same here: that's because the slot for the apostrophe (right single quote) in the Mac Roman character-set is occupied by the superior 1 in ISO Latin; to be correctly displayed on both systems some kind of translation has to take place. Some newsreaders include headers with each posting that specify the character set used, but the client at the other end has to act on the information in order to display the message correctly. Although I normally type the 'proper' marks, as a matter of habit, in Usenet I take care to restrict myself to the vertical quotes (and also use other typewriter conventions: double hyphens for dashes, triple periods for ellipses, and so on) for some assurance they won't get garbled. Concerning the subject, X (originally transcribing _xi_) is readily analysed to "ks" in words of Greek origin, and the practice of appending only the apostrophe to non-plurals ending in S is especially prevalent for classical and Latinate names. So beside "Jesus' disciples" we might see "Pollux' brother", and likewise "a tyrannosaurus' teeth" & "an archaeopteryx' feathers". It's less usual to drop the S from monosyllables, but someone who writes "Davy Jones' locker" might equally write "Karl Marx' _Capital_". As for the pronunciation, I think it's usually understood that omitting the S implies that the extra syllable would be elided -- but news headlines, with their peculiarly terse style, should probably be excepted from any such assumption. (I usually include the S myself in any case, and enunciate it more or less distinctly in speech, but I haven't surveyed style manuals on the subject.) SignatureOdysseus |
Reply to this Message |
 Sign In
 Join
 My Latest Posts My Monitored Threads My Blog My Photo Gallery My Profile My Homepage Start New Thread Enable EMail Alerts Rate this Thread
|
©2012 Advenet LLC Privacy Policy - Terms of Use
This website includes both content owned or controlled by Advenet as well as content owned or controlled by third parties.