Just Hangin' Out

Thursday's sunset

After a nearly sleepless night, I stayed home Thursday for a day of housecleaning while the Artist went to town, and then, taking a break to walk down  to the mailbox in the teeth of a cold west wind, managed to lock myself out of the house, with my cell phone in the house and a pan of milk left simmering on the stove. Ah, yes. That was Thursday, a grey, blustery, bitterly cold day in the ghost town. For all that grief, the mailbox had been empty, too. Friday had to be better.

And it was. 

Road to Chiricahua

On Friday our mailbox was full; friends from Michigan came for lunch; and in the afternoon the Artist and I made an expedition to the Mustang Mall, taking the Chiricahua way down and the Kansas Settlement Road back. 

Clouds stringing along

Clouds were beautiful, all around. And coming back to the cabin -- coming home -- we sighed with contentment as we settled into reading chairs with our respective books.

Moonlit mountains and desert

Books Read Lately

Several of the last few books I’ve read I can recommend, beginning with The Waning of the West, essays by Stan Steiner, published after his death in 1987. Steiner, born in Coney Island, New York, in 1925, fell in love with the West and spent most of his life writing about it. He challenged many Western myths and stereotypes and wrote not only of cowboys and ranchers but also of minority communities throughout frontier history. He acknowledged and insisted on the role of strong women in building the West; wrote the formerly untold story of Spanish Jews (run out of Spain by the Inquisition) and their role in Mexican ranching history; paid attention not only to Navajos in history but also to changes in the Navajo relationships with U.S. government and with corporations, etc. “The New West,” which the author died before he could finish, positions Ronald Reagan as a “new Westerner” and seeks to understand continuities and novelties in the evolving Western character, which he sees as the essential but very complicated American character 

While many details and statistics in The Waning of the West are dated, I recommend it for the the insights and political questions the author raises, issues we wrestling with in our country yet today. Perhaps Steiner’s most well-known book is La Raza: The Mexican Americans, one I need to read sometime in 2020. I also want to read The Last Horse, despite its, to me, frightening title.

Change of pace -- 

Then there was Greenwillow, a plunge into escape literature if ever there was one! B. J. Chute’s novel was a bestseller when it first appeared in 1956, and Lewis Gannett of the New York Herald Tribune thought it might “prove the literary find” of the year. Have you ever heard of it? Or of B. J. Chute? I had not. It begins:

Long ago, centuries perhaps, the village of Greenwillow had been stood in the corner and forgotten.

The following, gently meandering story takes place within the confines of the forgotten country village and its environs. There is a village church. When need arises for a new minister, one appears out of nowhere; when the need has been satisfied, one way or another the minister whose purpose has been fulfilled vanishes from the scene. It must be said that not everyone in and around Greenwillow is “churchly.” Only in the eyes of Reverend Lapp, however, are those who fail to attend services putting their souls in danger; Reverend Birdsong, who preaches sermons of love, leaving the devil, hellfire, and damnation to his colleague, apparently harbors no such fears.

Out in the country lives Martha Briggs, with her mother-in-law, Grannie Briggs; her stepson, Gideon; and all the little Briggses that have come along since Martha married the widower Amos, a wandering man. Amos, himself the first son of a wandering man, disappeared when he had the call to wander. Now he returns “at intervals” (as Reverend Birdsong observed), always long enough to ensure that, in time, another little Briggs will come to occupy the cradle. Gideon Briggs manages the farm and will until he gets the call himself — in anticipation of which he has vowed he will never wed, will leave no wife to raise children alone, nor father another wanderer to do the same in turn.

Down in the village live two sisters, Miss Maidy and Miss Emma, and with them lives Dorrie, a girl with no other name. No one knows Dorrie’s antecedents. As did more recently the Reverend Birdsong, Dorrie simply appeared one day, out of nowhere. A child then, she was taken in by the sisters and, to their delighted surprise, demonstrated what could only be called a gift for cooking and housekeeping. Now under the sisters’ roof Dorrie is becoming a woman. 

Dorrie put her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists and stared, gray-eyed and interested. It did seem hard on Mrs. Briggs that she should have wedded a wandering man, and hard on Gideon too, left with a farm and a fistful of kinfolk.

When the two reverends hear that Amos Briggs is back, Reverend Lapp is determined to impress upon Amos his duty to stay at home, and to his annoyance the easy-going Reverend Birdsong seems to feel he must go along, too.

When they came near the little meadow, they could hear Gideon’s scythe singing and the silky whisper of tall grass dropping down, and the late grasshoppers talking around the edge. The scent followed the scythe, the hot oven smell of yellow turning brown, the dusty-powder smell of clover, the sharp smell of bruised pennyroyal like a plume in the air….

The implacable, imperative call to wander, along with suspicions that the Devil himself may be at work in their midst, are the flies in the otherwise soothing ointment of Greenwillow life. But, as my friend Kathy in New South Wales says, I would not for quids spoil the story for you by telling you how everything comes out!

Moving on —

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, by Marry Norris, is a book I would have bought for the title alone. In fact, in truth, I did. 

But Between You and Me is far from a dry grammar reference book. Instead Norris gives us, in essays on particular grammatical issues, enticing scraps of memoir. A girl from Cleveland who studied dairy science along with English and drove a milk truck winds up working at the New Yorker! Well, that is a story!

Grammatical nitty-gritty stuff morphs into the personal early on, but I have to begin with the nitty-gritty. Let's begin with pronouns. Between You & Me? (Yes, there is an ampersand instead of a spelled-out conjunction in the title.) I’m there! 

I can overlook casual, conversational, colloquial, spoken instances of “between you and I” or “to Alphonse and I” (here I choose an unusual name to protect the guilty), but it drives me up the wall when paid professional writers (I’m not making this up) use these incorrect forms! As if they knew no better! (Do they not? Scary!) Or when I hear an ‘I’ that should be a ‘me’ on the national evening news! I want to shout out loud (and sometimes do), “Get it straight!”  

It seems to me that getting object pronouns right is unbelievably easy and that there is no excuse for a professional writer to fall into error on this score. It isn’t like figuring out how or when to use the subjunctive, for heaven’s sake, or being clear about the difference between the verbs ‘lie’ and ‘lay’ (where ‘lay’ is the past tense of ‘lie’ and ‘laid’ the past tense of ‘lay,’ one verb intransitive and one transitive, and God save us from remembering out what those terms mean!), which the same people, i.e., professional writers, should also make an effort to figure out if they want to call themselves writers — or maybe those thorny bits can be left to copy editors? But pronouns??? 

(1) “He gave it to Alphonse. He gave it to me.” 

(2) “He gave it to Alphonse and I”??? WRONG!!! 

Correct: “He gave it to Alphonse and me.” See (1).

Mary Norris, though, is no drill sergeant. She never puts on an annoying, smarter-than-thou act. For example, she freely admits to the amusement she felt when hearing people pronounce correctly words she thought they were mispronouncing. Coming from a modest background in Cleveland, Ohio, there were many words she had only seen in print and never heard pronounced, as well as words she had never encountered at all and could not believe were real words, which explained the faux pas she made when changing the word ‘terrine’ to read ‘tureen’ in copy she was editing. Fortunately, someone down the line caught that, and her error did not go into print. That is, she not only points out mistakes made by others but cops to her own. Disarming, n’est-ce pas? Refreshing!

Back to pronouns. Gendered pronouns, Norris tells us, became much more important and freighted with meaning for her when a beloved sibling decided to transition from male to female — and in this context Norris expresses gratitude for the English word ‘sibling,’ a word with no equivalent, she tells us, in Italian. 

One of the first sentences I formed in Italian class was ‘Mio fratello vuole essere mia sorella”: “My brother wants to be my sister.” 

She (Norris, that is) realizes how important words are when Dee, the sibling in question, is cast into gloom over having Mary refer to her as ‘he’ rather than ‘she’ when speaking to their waiter in a restaurant. There is a subsequent, quite enchanting scene with their mother. 

Well, I could go on, but you get the general idea. If you have an interest in language and writing, you will find this an enchanting book. I laughed out loud more than once while reading to myself and had to read several amusing passages aloud to the Artist, after he commented, “Someone is enjoying that book!” Indeed!

Oh, what the hell! I’ll go on a bit longer.

Any copy editor’s eye (and I worked as a copy editor -- but remember, I have no editor for this blog, so leave me a comment if you find errors!) is, always, not only on the sparrow but on every crumb and seed in the vicinity. So as you might imagine, reading a book by a copy editor and about copy-editing (note: hyphenation distinction as made by author’s employer, the New Yorker magazine) gave my own inner editor a strenuous workout. And once or twice, it was what the author did not note in her examples that I found striking.

In Chapter 5, “Comma Comma Comma Comma, Chameleon,” Norris dwells — and I mean, she dwells — on a particular passage from Melville, asking her reader to think about Melville’s placement of commas and how the commas might be used differently. She tries it this way and that. Okay. But what jumped out at me in the quoted passage was the way Melville conjugated the verb ‘to lie.’ 

Often have I lain thus, when the fact, that if I laid much longer I would actually freeze to death, would come over me….

All right, picture the scene. See character lying down. He has been lying down for quite a while, as he must do every night if he is to get any sleep: “Often have I lain thus.” Fine. But why on earth does Melville shift from the correct to the incorrect, the intransitive to the transitive, writing “if I laid” rather than “if I lay”? He is not, after all, in danger of laying an egg! And I realize that the focus in this example is on commas, but I kept waiting for Norris to mention that verb business in an aside — and endnote — something. Silence.

Another Melville example was initially much more alarming to me. The author of Moby-Dick, frustrated over the number of errors in proofs from his English publisher (of The Whale, as it was titled over there), finally decided to correct the worst and let the rest go, “jeering with himself at the rich harvest thus furnished to the entomological critics.” I couldn’t believe my eyes on first, second, and third readings of this passage. Light dawned at last on a fourth reading: the errors constituted for Melville “minute, gnat-like torments”! Entomological! Gnats! All right!

Such are the torments, pleasures, and delights of a reader cursed and blessed with the eye of an inner copy editor.

And now — history, fiction, grammar set aside — I turn to suspense and crime in the world of (believe it or not) bookselling as I open the first pages of John Grisham’s Camino Island. So if you want me in the next couple of days, I’ll be in Florida, hanging out with very shady characters! In the world of rare books and bookselling no less!

Spanish moss -- miles away from the desert!

To Replace or Re-Invent Myself, That Is the Question

We were all younger once.

One day this past September I received an unsolicited e-mail offer that I read with very mixed feelings. I’ll quote the bulk of it here verbatim (omitting the company name and link at the end but including a few editorial comments) so you can see what I mean:

Pamela - If you’re not 100% happy with your blog, you may want to consider trying a new writer!  

The key is to find a great writer that [sic] also has a deep understanding of your industry [!] 

The problem is, finding these writers [now we are looking for more than one?] can be a real challenge.  

To solve this problem, we use our award-winning _____ platform [I omit the name here, as it is no doubt trademarked) to search over 70,000 pro [sic] writers to find a handful of writers that [sic] we think will be a good match for your specific needs. Then, we have each writer write you [awk] the same sample article (title of your choosing).  

This makes it super easy [ugh!] for you to see which writer you like the best. 

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, just click below to schedule a time so we can talk.

Interesting, eh? Here’s some of what raced through my brain in response: 

Why would I not be happy with my blog? Should I be unhappy with it? Is the sender implying that the writing is substandard? There are certainly writers in the world more talented than I am, but I doubt they want to work for me without compensation! Because I can’t afford to pay a writer to write for me, and I can’t afford to hire a company to find a writer to write for me!

And let me just say that I am repelled by the term “industry” applied to the world of books! Anyone who (who, not that) would apply the term “industry” to the world of writers and publishers and booksellers would probably also refer to the books in my store as “product.” 

Finally, who among these 70,000 “pro” writers for hire knows my life and the books I read and stock and my bookstore better than I do? My blog is not about some abstract “industry,” but about my very personal world!

Lest you think, however, that I was sputtering in outrage over this e-mail, I assure you I was more amused than offended. Did a “pro” writer compose the e-mail? My inner editor (who always slumbers lightly with one eye open) would have taken “that” out of “writers that we think would be a good match” and maybe moved “that” up to the previous one-sentence paragraph, using it place of the awkward comma, and that “super easy” claim did not impress me, either. Overall, I found the entire message uninspired and uninspiring.

Okay, I understand it was a sales pitch. But the message I received (besides envisioning a writer reaching way over her head) was that the sender had not spent any time at all reading my blog before trying to sell me her (I’ll use the detested word here) product. Know thyself and know thy market!

On the other hand, I’m sympathetic, I really am. It’s a dog-eat-dog world [No offense, Sarah!], and everyone is seeking an audience, making a pitch, feeling around for a footing and a handhold — in short, trying to survive. And I’m no different. I’m just (and this is probably my Achilles heel rather than any excellence of character) not single-minded about it. My little stories and snippets, travelogues, tirades, and vignettes are all offered at the same price I am paid to write them, and if they help my Dog Ears Books business in any way, so much the better. If not, I’ve had the pleasure of the writing and the occasional pleasure of a kind and/or thoughtful word in response.

Self-invention and self-promotion are touted as what we should all be about these days, and as wages race to an ever-lower and lower global “bottom” (for those jobs not yet lost to drones and robots), there are more and more people of all ages trying to figure out their next moves. I give a lot of thought to the question myself. What next? What if I’ve nearly run out my string with this bookselling gig? 

One thing is sure. I won’t be hiring anyone else to do my writing for me. So if you’re not satisfied with what you find on Books in Northport, you'll have to look elsewhere. At least you’ll have no trouble finding (here comes another buzz word I despise) “content” all over the place. It’s a big, wide, wonderful world out there, and, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s overflowing with words.

Time Out for a Word Rant

"I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermittent dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates." – Hermann Melville, MOBY-DICK OR, THE WHALE.

There’s something that’s been eating away at me, and I can’t keep quiet any longer. My fellow Americans, if you among those guilty of this error, I’d like to shake you awake right now! You are driving me crazy! Never fear, this has nothing to do with politics. 

Let’s start with a quiz, if you don't mind. No one will know how you answer, so you risk nothing. In the following sentences, a form of which word belongs in the blank space: ‘rein’ or ‘reign’? Note that ‘reign’ and ‘rein’ both have verb and noun forms.

• The morning following a big storm, a majestic calm often _____ . 
• For the morning writing exercise, the professor always gave her students free _____.
•  At the public meeting, several speakers had to be asked to _____ in their impulsive speech.
•  The dictator’s _____ of terror lasted five years. He then handed over the _____ of power to his oldest son.
•  With the lightest touch on the _____, the third rider into the ring controlled her horse perfectly, and that team of horse and rider ultimately _____ supreme in the dressage competition.

If you find these two words confusing but grammar in general interesting, bear in mind that the verb ‘to rein’ is transitive, while ‘to reign’ is intransitive. For those not keen on grammar, what does this mean? Look at other verbs. ‘To throw’ is transitive; it takes an object. The dog’s owner threw the ball [object] for the dog to retrieve. To stand is intransitive and does not take an object. She remained outdoors for hours in the rain. It makes sense to ask, “She threw what object?” It doesn’t make sense to ask, “She remained what object?” She remained. The verbal buck stops there. Or He stood. Intransitive. But then there’s She stood their hectoring as long as she could, which is transitive, but that’s a different verb, though it looks the same. –Oh, all right, maybe transitive/intransitive won’t be much help here.... 

Think, then, of the famous Hallelujah Chorus: “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” “And He shall reign forever and ever.” (One online site I wish I hadn’t seen gave this as “He shall rain”—NO, NO, NO! Gods and humans do not rain. Only rain rains! Are we really confused about ‘rain,’ too? I find that hard to believe. I don’t want to believe it. Please, let it not be true!) If ‘reign’ is really the word you want, then it’s the word you want, but stop to think and be sure. “He handed over the reigns”? NO, NO, NO! Rein in—that is, hold back—that fevered rush to error!

To figure out which word you want, it helps most to know where each comes from. Think of regal, regency, regalia—all this pomp and circumstance has to do with kings and queens and courts. See the ‘g’ in all the words? On the other hand, there are horses, animals domesticated to our use, controlled with bits in their mouths and reins leading from those bits to the hands of a rider or driver. Give the reins a twitch, and the horse’s mouth feels it, and the trained horse responds. So in the sentence you are writing, which sense applies? If you are using the word as a metaphor, is your guiding image one of a ruler or an animal being controlled? Wordsmith Michael Sheehan gave readers of a brief Facebook exchange the following Latin origins: 'Reign' goes back to regnum, the office or power of a king, while the Latin verb retinere, from which comes 'rein,' means to curb or restrain.

What is our problem, Americans, with all the confusion over these two words?

The United States rejected monarchy from the start. No one reigns over the American people, and early Americans were very clear on that point! It meant a lot to them. For our first century, also, we were predominantly a horse culture, and every American knew that reining meant controlling. Today, in the 21^st century, both monarchs and horses have faded from general cultural consciousness, and a people with little feeling for matters royal or equestrian find themselves using old words out of historical context. For some reason—and I’d be interested in any speculations on why this might be so; because it is fancier???—the spelling related to royalty is the one almost always used these days, while that related to horses, which is often what the writer really wants but doesn’t know it, almost never appears. The problem is that the two meanings are very different.

When I posted my original (much shorter) rant on Facebook, asking friends for their understanding of these two words, several responded, and all my literate friends got it right, I'm happy to report, but my favorite response came from Sylvia Merz, librarian at the Leland Township Library, because her explanation was so delightfully succinct. (That is, she doesn’t go on and on and on the way I do.) Here is the way she distinguishes the two verbs:

“‘Reign’ is to rule; ‘rein’ is to control.”

Thank you, Sylvia, and my other clear-thinking friends! But are we fighting a losing battle? Is the day at hand when a single word will contain both meanings and thus makes no etymological sense at all? I give the last word today to someone I’ve never met:

The spelling “reign” in this expression is an example of the triumph of folk etymology over origin. The expression to give free rein to is figurative. It means to give a person freedom to act on his own authority. It derives from an equestrian term:
 free rein – a rein held loosely to allow a horse free motion; the freedom that this gives a horse. (OED)
 The word rein derives from a word meaning “a bond, check” from a verb meaning “to hold back. It’s related to retain. The word reign derives from a Latin word for kingship. To reign means to exercise the power of a king. The sense of this “reign” has become conflated with the expression “to give free rein to.”
The confusion has become so complete that it’s beyond correction.

Guest Blogger: A Polemic From the Prairie

The Political Challenges Inherent in Solving English Language Instruction and the Push for Latin as a Tool to Instruct Children in Learning Grammar

This essay is in part in reply to an article Pamela wrote concerning her frequent use of the present active participle. I was struck by the way in which American society at present rarely discusses grammar and the way in which grammar is taught today.  Originally, I had planned on writing only about how Latin might better teach children grammar in English, but my thoughts soon turned to the larger problem of NCLB and the way in which English is taught to children today. 

I read your article on the present active participle (that you posted some time ago), and I wanted you to know I enjoyed it. We as a society rarely discuss grammar, and it's good to know someone appreciates it as much as I do! Maybe we could reverse this trend if we brought Latin back into the curriculum, but that's a hard sell these days, though for what it's worth I was a colloquium a few years ago at U of I and the chair of the classics department at Indiana was going on and on about how Latin and foreign language in general are so effective at teaching kids grammar in English. I would surmise this is likely because our English grammar was adapted from Latin (and later French as well) and as such is not very intuition-friendly. Once the grammar has been established in another language, however, the student "translates" the grammar he or she knows from that language to English, just as the original grammarians did.

Yet, despite the common sense conclusion of the above stipulation, there is little reason to believe that school districts are going to start implementing Latin into their curricula at any time in the near future.  There are a number of reasons for this, mostly rooted in the fact that school districts must educate students in such a way so that they pass state standardized testing requirements at the end of the year.  These requirements, set forth in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, serve as a metric for which to judge school performance. Schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” in consecutive years may be forced to close, and states that fail to meet guidelines may lose federal funding.  So in response to the need to meet these requirements school districts across the country have implemented curricula that place emphasis on the material covered in these tests to such a degree that a standard curriculum has been adapted to meet the very language of the test, often to the detriment of the education the child actually receives. A good example here is the use of the term “magnitude” for “absolute value” in mathematics education. Even though the term “absolute value” is used across the board in higher education mathematics and the academic world in general, because someone decided that the term “magnitude” was more palatable this is the term used to educate students. 


The situation is no better in the reading and writing curriculum which, instead of nurturing a desire to read and an appreciation for language via grammatical instruction, forces children to memorize the differences between, for example, the “main idea” and “supporting details” in very boring passages so that they can pass the tests the state needs them to pass in order to receive federal funds. Forget diagramming sentences, which have almost entirely gone by the wayside; the push now is to develop only those ideas which are tested at the state level.  This is a tragedy, students are denied the best tools to develop actual comprehension, teachers are denied the autonomy they need in order to teach effectively, and those who develop a curriculum must tailor it in ways to meet the standards set forth by the states at the expense of what actually works. Yes, there is presently a “dumbing down” in curriculum development, and almost everybody is losing.

--Which is why it is all the more difficult to argue for changes such as the implementation of Latin and French as instructional tools in teaching effective grammar skills. The blowback that academics who push for this change undeniably face (if they are heard at all) is perfectly well understood because in many cases there simply is no space for these ideas in the curriculum.  Where there is space, educators are hard at work implementing their own ideas and might not be receptive to what they perceive to be little more that elitist academic suggestions. 

This is unfortunate, to say the least. Elitist or not, it is simply a fact that English grammar was shaped by Latin and that grammarians who taught English historically understood that language as well. There is no good reason not to teach English in such a way in that it “makes sense” to the students, especially those who come from backgrounds where English is not a first language or where the English spoken as home differs significantly from the English as it is taught in the schools.  Latin allows for the implementation of grammatical rules that do make sense, that teach subject and object, imperfect and perfect tense, and the relative pronoun in such a way as that it is abstracted from the politics of the English language; no matter what variety of the English is spoken at home, the rules learned from Latin carry over and comprehension is improved. 

I think eventually we will come to terms with NCLB and the way in which education is disseminated in America, but it may well be years down the road when we realize that the standardized testing–driven approach to education is counterproductive.  When that occurs, we will look more seriously at the arguments made by academics and educators to implement a better English curriculum, and we will undoubtedly find arguments to return to sentence diagramming, the teaching of Latin, and also the teaching of foreign language not just as a tool to understand another language but to better understand our own.

Despite the fact that I am pessimistic about change in the near future, I am not willing to capitulate, because if there is no push from those of us who are aware of the benefits of teaching English in this way, then we will most certainly lose. Maybe the solution is a push from the nonprofit sector to implement more "Language Arts" (a nebulous phrase as we rarely use the term "arts" in that sense any more) and incorporate some Latin into the curriculum--in other words, taking an entirely gradualist approach. At present that's not where the money is, but once is case is made to the right people, in the right way (i.e. not just expecting people to adapt their curriculum because we are right and they are wrong), perhaps it will be.

We also have to be aware of the politics at play and be sensitive to the fact that many individuals have their hearts in the right places and really are doing what they can to educate students.  I'm not on vanguard here (yet), but I do recognize that this push must come from people from different walks of life, not just academics who are known to shout angrily into the wind on occasion. 



In any event, it’s a long, tough road ahead.

- Matthew Case

B.A., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Master’s in Public Administration candidate, 2013,

University of Illinois at Springfield

P.S. Monday, April 30: For another view and response to Matthew's position, see Ben Wetherbee's blog post here. 

One More Teeny Tirade from a Word Crank, Plus a Slightly Shady Joke

Maiya busted me yesterday on multiple-digit numbers. They do not take an apostrophe, as do single-digit numbers when plural, so my post needed editing to incorporate her correction. I had already edited it once to add in the its/it’s confusion, my original motivation for writing about apostrophes in the first place.

To recap that one little area: its: possessive pronoun (like my); it’s: it is. They are not interchangeable. This is not a question of variable style on which opinions may differ.

My crank for today is short and simple. I, he, she, they are subject pronouns. The object forms are me, him, her, them. (You doesn’t change so creates no problems.) The most common error made by educated people is to use ‘I’ when ‘me’ is correct. “They gave Richard and I a gift.” No, no, no!!! You would never say, “They gave I a gift,” would you? Correct: “They gave Richard and me a gift” or “They gave a gift to Richard and me.” When in doubt, leave the proper name out and see how it sounds.

John O’Hara used the incorrect form intentionally in dialogue, arguing with copy editors who wanted to "correct" the way his characters spoke that young, upperclass, educated people really did make this mistake all the time. And such people--not just young ones, either--still do. So if you’re writing dialogue, and you want to show your character making a grammatical error, it works. Otherwise, you’re the one making the error, and that doesn’t work.

Oops, I almost forgot the joke. It’s about a philosopher giving a lecture and looking to generalize his point by using letters instead of specific object names. He was talking about 'essences,' or what medieval philosophers called ‘quiddity,’ such as the 'horseness' of horses, only he didn’t want it to sound as if only horses or apples or tables had essences, so he began by using the letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ but was quickly led into a –ness form that sounded very peculiar and distracting. Backtracking, he erased the chalk letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ on the board and replaced them with the letters ‘p’ and ‘q’. Where the lecture went from there I leave to your imagination.

Yes (sigh!), this is what passes for a joke among philosophers.

Help Stamp Out Weedy Word Forms (Warning: Word Crank on Soapbox)

Let’s start with the simplest apostrophe error first. Plural nouns do not have apostrophes, with the exception--and even this is in flux--of letters and numbers. Single letters, e.g. p’s and q’s, 6’s and 7’s, take the apostrophe, longer strings, e.g., 1960s, etc. do not. Correction to yesterday's post as it appeared: Maiya has reminded me that only single letters and numbers need apostrophes, which makes sense upon reflection. The plural of the letter ‘a’ without an apostrophe would look like the word ‘as,’ whereas ABCs is unambiguous as it stands. I still seem to remember numerical decades taking apostrophes in my younger days, e.g., 1950’s, but Maiya is correct that current usage (she says going back at least 30 years) is to omit the apostrophe, so write that decade as 1950s to avoid the copy editor's pencil. Just goes to show how we can keep each other on our toes. Thanks, Maiya!

But apostrophes can still be confusing, and people worry about leaving one out where they should have put one in, so the little squiggly superscript comma gets thrown into all kinds of situations where it doesn’t belong. When you see a sign for a “Farmer’s Market,” don’t go by the punctuation and expect to find one lone farmer. Similarly, it’s unlikely that an event sponsored by the “Lion’s Club” is being hosted by a single Lion. And when the sign says, “No Dog’s Allowed” or “No camera’s, please,” you can mentally delete those apostrophes, too. In each of these cases, a simple unadorned plural is what the writer intended. Several (possibly many) farmers, a group of lions, no (i.e., not one!) dogs or cameras!

Plural noun: no apostrophe (unless a single letter or number is standing in for a noun).

Possessive pronouns do not have apostrophes, either. My, our, your, his, her, their. Carry the lack of inappropriate decoration in these words over to his, hers, yours, theirs, its.

In short, just because a word ends with an ‘s’ doesn’t mean it needs an apostrophe!

Here’s where you do need it:

(1) Use an apostrophe when two words are joined in a contraction (do not = don’t; is not = isn’t, it is = it's, etc., including the first word in my sentence above, here + is = here’s);
(2) Use an apostrophe to show possession with a noun, common or proper (the tree’s leaves, the sun’s warmth, Sarah’s dish, Pamela’s bookstore, etc.).

In summary, yes, possession is sometimes indicated with an apostrophe and sometimes not, but the distinction is simple: possessive nouns take the apostrophe, possessive pronouns do not.

Then just keep in mind that the apostrophe in a contraction indicates a letter left out (such as the ‘i’ in ‘is’ or the ‘o’ in ‘not’).

There are a few special cases left out of this discussion, but for the sake of correcting 99% of common errors I’ve gone for the broad brushstrokes. Many years ago, I worked in a very boring office for a very dull boss. One day, he surprised me by saying something I found interesting. You may think this remark of his mind-numbingly dull, but I’m interested in language, and you have to know the kind of thing he usually said, word for word from day to the next. The unusual, interesting observation was: “We may see the disappearance of the apostrophe in our lifetime.” Little did that man anticipate that apostrophes would proliferate like spotted knapweed, popping up everywhere!

So don't be guilty! Nip those inappropriate apostrophes in the bud! Do not propagate! Your old high school English teacher will sleep better at night, knowing that you are doing your part.

Postscript: I've gone back into this post to add the most misunderstood pair of words related to this subject, its/it's. I hope you can see the difference! The cat drank all its milk. It's too late to give the kitten any. Possessive vs. contraction. See?