Date: 2025-04-25 05:51 am (UTC)
dine: (star cookies - smartlikejustin)
From: [personal profile] dine
there is no logic. people treat them as if they're decorative, with no actual connection to the grammatical rule. if it ends in an "S", best throw in an apostrophe, just in case

Date: 2025-04-25 07:41 am (UTC)
glaurung: (Default)
From: [personal profile] glaurung
The sample size is small, but it looks like the rule in their head is, a plural ending in S gets an apostrophe when it is the last word?

So they’d write “milk and egg’s”. But not “egg’s and milk”.
Edited Date: 2025-04-25 08:03 am (UTC)

Date: 2025-04-25 04:35 pm (UTC)
steorra: Part of Saturn in the shade of its rings (Default)
From: [personal profile] steorra
Another possible rule is that the apostrophe is only for "longer" plurals, i.e. plurals where the base word is more than 4 letters, so "Chip" and "Food" are too short for an apostrophe. (It can't be based on syllable count, obviously.)

I also wondered if it's based on anything about the class of sounds the word ends with, but I can't find anything. It would have been interesting if it was only after voiced sounds and not voiceless ones, or vice versa, but that doesn't work.

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