I don't like an approach which blames people for their handicap, even in jest. The "zero tolerance" approach recommends that we angrily harangue greengrocers and others who have failed to learn the standard English norms. The system has let them down, and they have, in effect, been left with a literacy handicap. ![]() But if they have not learned it, then something has gone wrong with this aspect of their education. It is not a standard English spelling, and if people want to be perceived to be educated they need to learn it. In terms of modern orthographic practice, potato's is of course wrong. We find them throughout Shakespeare's First Folio, in Dr Johnson's Dictionary, and right through to the present day. Using an apostrophe in nouns which end in a vowel is something we find from the very moment apostrophes arrived in English, in the 16th century. In some cases, there was a real possibility of ambiguity (is logos the plural of logo or the Greek word for "word"?). But not all words did this (pianos, casinos), and in such cases there was a natural tendency to remind readers of the "oh" pronunciation by using an apostrophe. So early on in English there was a trend to indicate the 'oh' sound by adding an "e" (volcanoes, potatoes). Volcanos looks as if the ending might rhyme with "toss". When a noun ends in a vowel, it feels odd to pluralise it by simply adding an "s". Most nouns in English end in a consonant. Why is there an apostrophe in such cases as MA's and i's? Because these are words which end in a vowel. In the case of such usages as potato's, we need to understand why people make the error in the first place, if we hope to correct it. ![]() So here we have a raft of usages where we have to be tolerant of the plural apostrophe. There is a tendency today to omit the apostrophe in some of these cases, but the alternative usage is still widely encountered. They allowed a plural apostrophe after abbreviations ( she has three MA's), numerals ( he hit three 6's), and dates ( in the 1990's). Even the 19th-century printers (who tried to establish the possessive apostrophe rule) recognised that there were exceptions. Similarly, we find do's and dont's, and many more. Dot the is would be a serious reading miscue and relying on an alternative typeface (such as an italic i) is awkward, especially in handwriting. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid doing so. The normal punctuation for the following sentence is to use an apostrophe: We need to dot the i's and cross the t's. The plural apostrophe is a case in point, as there are so many exceptions which allow the practice. ![]() When an area of language is so messy, it is not fair to be zero-tolerant - with all the belligerence that this phrase evokes - when someone finds the learning of it to be a problem. ![]() Alternative usages exist, and there are many exceptions to the rules. The problem with punctuation is that most of its features do not present such a clear-cut state of affairs. It would be an error to spell rhubarb as rubarb, because this is not a recognised variant form in any part of the English-writing world. It is an error to put the article after the noun, for example (as in cat the), because no one ever does this in any dialect of English, standard or nonstandard. There are indeed many areas of language where such agreement exists. Then it would be easy to identify errors. Truss would have a case if punctuation was something which everyone completely agreed about. I wrote The Fight for English to explain why, and to dissuade people from going down that path. Lynne Truss and others do us a disservice when they suggest that punctuation "errors" - such as the use of a plural apostrophe, as in potato's - is something to which we should give no quarter. People are zero-tolerant of child abduction, for example. Zero tolerance is possible when there is a clear-cut contrast between two behaviours, one of which society agrees to be right and the other society agrees to be wrong. There are some things in life we can justifiably be "zero tolerant" about, but punctuation is not one of them.
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