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Archive for the ‘Blogfinger Grammarian’ Category

The Blogfinger Grammarian: In a Daze Over Punctuation

Posted in Blogfinger Grammarian, Blogfinger News, Charles Layton, tagged on May 29, 2012| 7 Comments »

By Charles Layton

In the midst of all these recent stories about Day’s Ice Cream, the Grammarian has noticed a nagging problem of punctuation. In fact, the Grammarian has concluded that it’s an issue our community can no longer ignore.

I refer, of course, to the lack of an apostrophe in the name of the place. The sign in the window says, simply: Days.

See? There’s no apostrophe.

Elsewhere, though — on websites and in promotional material — one does find an apostrophe. In fact, the owners’ new outlet in Asbury Park calls itself Just Another Day’s. A clever name. But notice that, unlike its Ocean Grove parent, it does have an apostrophe.

Photos by Mary Walton

The Ocean Grove Chamber of Commerce’s website also spells the name with an apostrophe. But in reviewing various other websites that list Day’s –including merchantcircle.com, menupix.com, company.com and bringfido.com — we found that some do use the apostrophe and some don’t. Inconsistency reigns.

We at Blogfinger have been a part of this problem. We’ve sometimes gone with the apostrophe, sometimes not, as the spirit moved us. So we now feel obliged to clear things up.

On first consideration, our conclusion was that the name requires an apostrophe. It’s a possessive noun.

But not so fast! A question remains as to where to put that apostrophe, and that question leads us into a grammatical briar patch.

Day’s is reported to have been founded in 1876 by two brothers, William F. and Pennington Day. So if the business belonged to two individuals, both named Day, one would think it should properly have been spelled using the plural possessive form — Days’ Ice Cream. The apostrophe should go after the “s” that forms the plural, not before it.

Later in its history, the place fell into the hands of Agnes Day, the sister of the two brothers. If the ownership was then solely hers, she might have wanted to change the word from plural possessive to singular possessive, which would be Day’s.

Early photographs of the building, however, show the name Days on the front with no apostrophe at all. What could that mean? Could it mean that the original owners, the Day brothers, didn’t know their grammar and punctuation? Or could it be that they didn’t think of the name as being in the possessive case at all? That would be valid. While many businesses and products named for a person are cast in the possessive case — examples would be Macy’s Department Store, Hershey’s Chocolate and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream —  many others are not. Think of Ford Motor Company, Reynolds Wrap, Pillsbury Pancake Mix, Oscar Mayer Bacon, Calvin Klein Underwear. In these cases, the persons’ names are not treated as possessive nouns but as modifying adjectives, which don’t take an apostrophe.

It’s just possible that the two Day brothers knew exactly what they were doing back in the 19th century. They didn’t think of the use of their name as a possessive. They thought of it the way Calvin Klein and Mr. Pillsbury did, and so didn’t use an apostrophe. Later, probably some time in the 20th century, other owners must have started to assume that the name Days was meant to be possessive, so they started adding the apostrophe. But since the glass on the storefront of the building has historical value, and is a work of art, you can see why no subsequent owner would have wished to replace it — or, worse yet, to paint in an apostrophe. Sometimes history and aesthetics trump grammatical correctness.

But what I’m saying is that, seen from one point of view, the original spelling — the spelling on that storefront window — is correct after all. But that doesn’t mean the Chamber of Commerce and the bringfido website and the Day’s outlet in Asbury Park have it wrong. The arguments for and against the apostrophe seem equally valid, depending on the original intent of the founders, which is impossible to know. (The Day brothers might not have given a rip. They might have left it to the discretion of the sign painter. Where does that put us?)

So here is the Grammarian’s final ruling:

The lack of an apostrophe has a strong historical precedent. We should go with that.

Case closed.

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The Blogfinger Grammarian: The Slow Death of Metaphors — (Some, Like Zombies, Just Keep Lumbering On)

Posted in Blogfinger Grammarian, Blogfinger News, tagged on January 21, 2012| 5 Comments »

By Charles Layton

This week I read a news story about the jobless recovery. It said that even though companies still aren’t doing much hiring, their investment in new equipment has gone “into overdrive.”

That little metaphor struck me as a tad old-fashioned. It feels like the early 1960s. I expect the day will come when people no longer even get the reference. “On steroids” means much the same thing but is more contemporary.

Trends in metaphors follow changes in technology, science and life style. Take the way we visualize our brains. Nobody knows how thought really happens, so we use metaphors. The age of mechanization gave us expressions like “The wheels were turning in his head” or “He’s got a screw loose” — clock metaphors, I suppose those are.

Thomas Edison not only invented new electrical gadgets, he also gave cartoonists a handy way to characterize brain activity – an idea came to be represented by a light bulb! (Before we had light bulbs we had weather metaphors. A new idea would “dawn” on us, like the sun coming up. Or we’d have a “brain storm.”) More recently, we’ve started saying that our minds are “hard-wired,” which is a bit more modern. Thanks to the advent of data processing, we also say, when we don’t understand something, that it “doesn’t compute.”

Jesus told his followers, “Take my yoke upon you,” which held its currency for nearly two millennia. But if Jesus had been preaching in the 20th century you know he’d have used something more contemporary – like maybe a car metaphor. Or even, in our own time, a reference to the Internet.

The more abstract a thing is, the more metaphorical our descriptions of it need to be. Just about everything we say or think about the Internet is a metaphor. We speak of it in terms of roads (the information superhighway, fast and slow lanes, traffic, crashing) and water (surfing, navigating, streaming, piracy) and physical space (“the cloud”).

As old practices and technologies die out, the metaphors about them grow obsolete and their origins are forgotten. Still, they hang around for a while. We all understand what “cash on the barrel head” means, outdated as that is. To “drop the dime” on someone still means to tattle on them, even though we no longer have pay phones.

You probably know that our expression “bite the bullet” refers to a wounded soldier biting a musket ball to keep from screaming during field surgery. You may also know why we call an unreliable person “a loose cannon.” It’s a naval metaphor, referring to an unsecured cannon sliding across the ship’s deck – a wonderfully vivid image.

But I bet you didn’t know that the word “aboveboard” is a metaphor referring to a card player at a table (which once was called a “board”).

You did know that? OK, how about the word “aftermath.” It’s a completely dead metaphor, and it comes from farming. A “math” used to mean a patch of mown hay or grain. And an “aftermath” was the grass that sprang up after a farmer had mowed a field. Now that I’ve told you that, you’ll think of it every time you see the word aftermath.

Here’s a Cole Porter song that’s one long string of metaphors, some of them quite dated, others less so. The singer is Louis Armstrong, who is of course timeless.

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NEW FEATURE: “The Blogfinger Grammarian”

Posted in Blogfinger Grammarian, Charles Layton, Feature article, tagged on September 27, 2011|

By Charles Layton

QUESTION: In a recent story about a photo exhibit, Blogfinger wrote: “Here is a photograph of Geanna’s.” Isn’t this use of an apostrophe S incorrect in combination with the word “of”?

ANSWER: In olden days, when grammar and punctuation rules flowed down from Mt. Olympus to school teachers and thence to the rest of us, this usage was condemned for being superfluous. The possessive in English could be formed in one of two ways, by using “of” — as in “the voice of reason” or “the snows of Kilimanjaro” — or by using an apostrophe S. Using both was like using a double negative (“I don’t have no shoes”). Although the meaning was perfectly clear, putting it that way made one sound like Li’l Abner. (Note to younger readers: Li’l Abner was a character in a newspaper comic strip. A newspaper was … oh, forget it.)

As the gods of Olympus lost their grip, people more and more ignored this injunction against the double possessive. Now, if you still care about the issue or if you fear the frowns and sneers of persnickety nitpickers like The Blogfinger Grammarian, just say “Geanna’s photo” and you’re home free.

In informal situations, of course, you can usually get away with “the photo of Geanna’s.” Such small transgressions aren’t nearly as bad as parking inside the yellow-lined rectangles on Mt. Hermon Way. Just don’t try slipping such expressions into a legal brief, a scholarly article or a proposed amendment to the New Jersey Constitution.

I would argue that traditional “correctness” is usually to be preferred, though, whatever the context. It costs nothing and has no down side. And even though Zeus is dead, preserving small linguistic distinctions still has value, because losing them can make the language less precise. I have read that the Latin tongue became less precise in just such ways when the Roman civilization moved from its classical into its decadent phase. You know what followed that.

-0-

Ed. note: If you have a question for “The Blogfinger Grammarian” you may submit it via pg1425@verizon.net. We won’t answer every one, but we will choose those that seem of the greatest general interest — or maybe just those that happen to ring our bell.

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