Why Martin Lewis’ is correct grammar! Blog discussion

poorbutrich

MSE_Martin wrote: »

You'd be amazed how often...

I would take this as a compliment - it means people are reading the site very thoroughly and expect the high standards of your journalistic research to apply to your grammar as well! :beer:

I have to agree that I would put "Lewis' " but having just emailed an MSEr to point out that it's "paid", not "payed", I think there are far more serious errors throughout the forums, (should that be fora? ) such as the CONSTANT misuse of number v amount/'your' instead of 'you're' and 'their' instead of 'they're' or 'there'. And to those that say "oh, it doesn't matter", well it quite often changes the meaning!

There was a long-running thread on dfw called "guess whose back....?" - I thought there would be pictures of celebrities' backs and you had to guess who they belonged to!

Fifigrace

For those who have a problem with using the correct grammar (Martin Lewis's MoneySavingExpert.com), why not just make it Martin's MoneySavingExpert.com on the masthead?

domoneill

Apparently, the absence of a trailing 'S' is an Americanism. The British variant is grammatically accepted to have an 'S' after the apostrophe, e.g. 'James's room'.

Although I don't know where the possessive 'S' morpheme would be appended to the plural of words such as 'eye'......

I think that saying 'James' room' sounds much more unusual than 'James's room', which seems more natural to me. However, I suppose this relates to the 'an/a' debate, whereby the majority of people prefer to say 'a hotel' or 'a human', as opposed to the gramatically correct 'an hotel' or 'an human'.

MilkyJoe

An human ?

Frankspeaking

It's its and it's that have kept me going for some twenty years in my plain English business (which isn't 'plain' anyway!) And being from Newcastle, may not be English either! It is a business though.

And, sorry, I couldn't resist it... but on the registration page it says 'Tick this box to recieve the email'. If the site wasn't so worth reading in detail, I may not have seen that.

Amanita_2

Keeping well out of the aphostrophe arguement - I get much too wound up about it -almost as wound up as I get by the phrase " Pls be nice to all moneysavers". Now that REALLY jars.

nzseries1

domoneill wrote: »

as opposed to the gramatically correct 'an hotel' or 'an human'.

I disagree. Could you please provide a reliable source that says that this is gramatically correct? This page http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/hotel says:

The form an for the indefinite article is used before a spoken vowel sound, regardless of how the written word is spelt. If you say 'an otel' when speaking (which is now often regarded as distinctly old-fashioned), then it may be appropriate for you to write 'an hotel'; but most people say 'hotel' with a sounded 'h', and should write 'a hotel'.

As I suspected, this one depends on a person's accent.

JimmyTheWig

We are a pedantic lot, aren't we! See the number of comments on the use of "12pm" in the Forum downtime notice.

the_lace

zzzLazyDaisy wrote: »

ROFL..... some people must have such a lot of time on their hands!!!

zzzLazyDaisy: Post Count: 2,622

coughironycough :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

EdInvestor

jonthedog wrote: »

I hadn't realized you were aware of this and decided to forgo the extra 's' anyway for the sake of branding...explaination accepted, after all, the masthead isn't designed to be read out. You may as well get rid of the apostrophe entirely, though.

Quite agree.

If you want to use the possessive, then it looks wrong to me as it is.

But why bother to use the possessive in the logo?It's not necessary to convey the meaning. If it were me I would just drop the apostrophe completely, problem solved.

You don't see the possessive case used in newspaper headlines very often for the same reason, as it tends to look awkward - and causes pedants to write in about incorrect use of the language .