The death of the possessive its

Yes Jalima, it's the apostrophe in 'love's to tread' that I was referring to.

Bathsheba if Josepha is the daughter of Mr. & Mrs Francis - how come her own surname is Williams??
I have wondered about this too Lewie. Not so odd in this day and age for children to have a different surname to their parents, with lots of blended families, but in the mid 19th century? I would love to know the back story of this little family.

stilllearning, ?

GG cba!
Remember the glass houses!
Don't need to keep notes as each mistake is glaringly obvious.
Happy to drop my proofreading exercises when you drop the relentless nitpicking!

stilllearning nice one!

still earning ?

The comments about mistakes on gravestones reminded me of this story.

The devout wife of a Yorkshireman died. He decided on the text for her gravestone. "Lord, she was thine."

After the stone was installed he went to inspect it, and was very angry to see that it stated "Lord, she was thin"

Phoning the stonemason, he berated him. "You stupid man. You have missed off the E!" With abject apologies, he promised to put it right at once.

Next day, the Yorkshireman returned to check that it was done. The text now read, "Ee, Lord, she was thin!"

GreenGran ??

My iPad often changes text using the wrong it’s or its (it just did it again!).

When I was doing teaching practice in the late 1970s I was asked to teach the apostrophe to one of the classes I was assigned. Some students got it eventually, some never did. I was talking to my supervisor who told me that years before when he was doing his teaching practice he was also asked to teach the apostrophe. He had a few frustrating lessons, thought he had cracked it with them all but when one girl handed in a piece of work to him she had inserted apostrophes to her first name and her surname which both ended with an ‘s’. His opinion was that he could have used the lesson time for something more meaningful and that eventually it would go out of use but it is still going strong and still being used wrongly, especially, as Jalima says, on shop signs.

I would rather the apostrophe were not used at all than misused. Leave it aht!

Blinko I often told pupils, "If in doubt, leave it out!"

The function of all apostrophes is to signify some letter or letters omitted. So we have'Alex's bed' which really stands for 'Alex (hi) s bed'.

'Alexa's bed' also stands for 'Alexa (hi) s bed'. Despite that Alexa is female sex her gender is not included in 'Alexa's bed'.

There is no apostrophe for more than one bed. Similarly patios, bidets, and bananas. E.G. "My bidet's on the patio but Betty's patios are both at the front of her house. The bidet in my case gets an apostrophe because I shoulod perhaps have written that my bidet is on the patio.

I agree with Blinko "if in doubt leave it out."

It's easy to learn correct use of apostrophes if one reads a lot, as it's down to intuition. I guess that less reading is done now than in former years.

I just began to read a post to another forum about a difficult mathematical matter which I had little hope of understanding in any case, although I can persist. I gave up after the first paragraph because the otherwise erudite author had not taken the trouble to learn correct use of apostrophes, so I guessed that his general reading had been neglected.

The trouble with the if in doubt leave it out approach is that many people who get it wrong are not in doubt at all. I suspect many of them never even think about it but just bung in apostrophes as the mood takes them.

You're right there baggs.
While teaching, I occasionally had a child disagreeing with me because gran/mum/dad said all s's need apostrophes! All this despite several lessons on the topic!
I needed a few examples to convince them otherwise.
La's'sie's? Mi's'sing? Wi'shing? Cla's'sroom
It was obvious that every s did not need an apostrophe.
We, once again, investigated why and when they are needed.
Got there eventually with most pupil's but note's from parent's showed that they weren't entirely convinced!

Wow! Never thought of this. I use grammar according to what suits the best on the framing. lol. And which comes out to be correct. Haha. Although I have a good understanding of grammar.....

Does autocorrect also drop random commas into sentences? I see almost as many of those used unnecessarily as I do apostrophes.

I have noticed that a lot of people put one between subject and verb. For example, The writer, put an apostrophe in the writing place.

Not that my own punctuation is always perfect, of course.

Saggi
I worked for rather large retail chain and once they sent a large plastic hanging banner to all the shops in the chain, to announce our new opening times. The banner announced ; open ...6 am .... till 11 pm. When I pointed out that should be ‘til not till, the management laughed at me. The next day every banner was recalled , at great expense, and re-issued two weeks later. Smug or what!

But till is a perfectly correct synonym of until, isn't it?

Where is the edit button when I most need it?
... in the wrong place, not in the writing place.

My proofreading leaves a lot to be desired

This is a good point of discussion.

Language changes. Particularly a language like English, made up of so many other languages.

If it's down to poor grammar, obviously the changes are bad. BUT language is always in flux. And I speak as an English teacher.

And I speak as an English teacher

Bathsheba I assumed that she was the daughter of John and Ann Francis- surname missed out - would have been Williams-but there wasn't enough space. Mother having two names possibly because there was more than one Ann in the family.
Grammarly on till
Until, Till, or 'Til. Until indicates when something will happen, begin, or end. Till is not an abbreviation of until—it's actually older than until—and it should not be written with an apostrophe. 'Til turns up now and then, but major usage dictionaries and style guides consider it an error, so it's best to avoid it.