Peoples' incorrect use of apostrophe's annoy's me more.
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No I didn't.
To put the apostrophe at the end is as grammatically incorrect as the other two instances.
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Please don't take any of this personally, as I don't mean any offence. As I explained elsewhere on the page, the version you suggest only makes sense in a very specific context, and not this one.
Ok. So you still want some proof! As an illustration, try googling for "people's opinions", with the quotation marks. You'll find 2,610,000 hits.
Now try googling for "peoples' opinions". Google tries to autocorrect you, and you find that the vast majority of the hits are without any apostrophe at all (a mistake, since we're using a possessive), incorrectly picked up by the google search. The remainder are mostly grammatical mistakes and typographical errors.
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None taken. Though to be fair we are not talking about people's opinions, we are talking about their use (which I did search). It actually gave me more results under the first one, though many of the threads are asking which to use.
I couldn't be bothered to do all different kinds of searches.
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While we weren't talking about people's opinions, the use of the apostrophe will remain unaffected whether we are talking about their opinions, their fitness, their use of commas or their underpants :)
"Opinions" was the first search that came to mind, and it provided enough results to be relatively conclusive.
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Its called irony obviously your not too Smart arent you i bet you fails at gramar and punctuation to
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If you were to use irony you'd fail at all of them, not some of them. I guess I'm not too smart. In fact I must surely be a retard right?
Sorry if I have ruined your life with this thread. I shall now cry myself to sleep, contemplating suicide.
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Evidently your irony chip is in upside down today :D
Besides, "annoys" is not a pluralisation, and would be correct in this instance:
"People's incorrect use of apostrophes annoys me more."
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Correctamundo, But the "use" is an "it" not a "they"...
In terms of sentence structure, is the "use" that we're getting annoyed by, not the "people" or their "apostrophes".
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"People use grammar incorrectly" is the correct phrase.
No 's'.
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I don't think it matters whether people is singular or plural, because either way it is referring to a singular thing, and that thing annoys you. The thing that annoys you is the incorrect use of apostrophes, a.k.a. "people's incorrect use of apostrophes".
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Most of the time, you can tell whether a sentence is grammatically correct by ear. At least in cases like this one, where the disagreement is over pluralization. Of course there are exceptions, but I use it as a rule of thumb, and it's usually served me well.
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Yeah, that's what I was doing.
Also, you're right - recognized sentence patterns (how it "sounds") can be used to help your brain to make the connection intuitively. I'm just arguing that personal perspective doesn't have a relation to grammar or how we determine if a sentence works or not.
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He was saying your point was irrelevant (by making an irrelevant comment himself). You asked which sounded better, I told you. It required no further input.
I know how something sounds doesn't dictate how it's written, but it can help (which is what I thought you meant).
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No. It isn't. Not unless we are talking about people collectively, as a racial group. I'm talking about aggregations of unrelated individuals, united only by their misuse of grammar.
You might talk about "Indigenous peoples" or "Pacific peoples", but "peoples" is used to describe a racial grouping, not an unspecified section of the public who get their dots, squiggles and dashes muddled up, and live in fear of a visit from the the grammar SS. Those are just "people".
"Some people's incorrect use of apostrophes annoys me more."
"The Pacific Peoples' incorrect use of apostrophes annoys me more."
Unless you're suggesting some sort of correlation between an as yet unspecified racial group and grammatical aptitude, you definitely want to leave the apostrophe where I put it...
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No need to be a dick. AtomicWoodchuck was using that with the apostrophe that way. I was agreeing that it made sense with the apostrophe before the "s". Where I had previously thought it ok after the "s". I wouldn't call that being stubborn but whatever.
What you've done is completely restructure the sentence.
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Haha, I misunderstood your reply to him - I thought you were just saying the exact same thing again because that's what I was expecting to see.
I did intend to completely restructure the sentence to make a point and to make a joke. Sorry for the misunderstanding on my part.
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No. "Annoys" is tied directly to "use." It has no relation to "People's."
The reason is that the use is it what is doing the annoying. The people themselves are not annoying the "me" in that sentence. Therefore, only "use" is tied to "annoy."
This doesn't mean I'm automatically right, but I'd like to explain that my credibility comes from these things:
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Okay, so, let me explain this with words and then a diagram.
Grammar rule: The number (singular or plural) of the subject must match the number of the verb.
"Use" is the subject. "Annoys" is the verb. Therefore, they must both be plural or both be singular.
Constituent tree:
(S (NP (NP Peoples incorrect use)
(PP of
(NP apostrophes)))
(VP annoys
(NP me)
more)
.)
EDIT: the chart didn't hold it's formatting enough to make sense, so I removed it.
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You're right about "use" being key, but fuck me sideways.... That is a hugely impressive chart, but I don't know how to begin understanding it.
Is there a hidden giveaway?
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I removed the chart because I couldn't get the formatting to work right.
If you want to parse the sentence yourself and see a correct chart, enter it
here.
For extra fun, uncheck "allow null links" and then enter the sentence incorrectly. It won't display the chart because it doesn't parse grammatically incorrect sentences. Also, don't expect that parser to always work, even with correct sentences. Computers can't parse every sentence because computers don't really understand language or even the nuanced possibilities of a word. It can't understand conversational sentences (even though they might be correct) like "Hey, you, what's up?"
(No hidden giveaway. Just nerdy fun.)
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All those letters and no hidden giveaway?
Son... If you will pardon the grammatical shortcomings of this phrase, I am disappoint :(
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In the first three, the people are the subject of the sentence. They're the ones annoying you, so you should be using "annoy".
In the fourth sentence, the use of "annoys" is correct, since the subject is "use".
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Subject is "amount" - singular. Nothing to see here...
My one glib, throwaway comment that wasn't really very funny in the first place, and the thread has ended up circled in chalk, and covered in tyre tracks, face down in the middle of Grammar Boulevard :(
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To be honest, one of the English teachers on the thread will do a much better job explaining than me, since they explain it week in, week out, and will probably have some nice well worn stock answers they can reel out, but the subject is the "thing" which is doing something, or having something done to it. In this case, the "deed" is causing you annoyance.
If you re-read the sentences, in the first three, it's clearly the people who are annoying you. In the fourth, it's something belonging or attributable to the people (their "use" of cars), as designated by the possessive form ("people's"), which is annoying you.
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That's pretty much the explanation I would use. Another way to think about it is this: find the action happening in the sentence. Then find out what is doing that action.
As to explaining it week in and week out, I'm not sure I've actually ever had to explain it to anyone except when I tutored in high school. I teach college English classes, so my students are expected to already know the most basic element of grammar (how to find the subject and verb.) My classes don't spend any time on grammar at all, unless an issue is shared by several of my students at once, such as the occasional run-on sentence epidemic or a confusion-about-the-semicolon plague.
That's not to say that my students have perfect grammar usage without proofreading, but they usually understand their mistakes and fix them, given enough time and a request from me to do so (after looking over their rough drafts.) I suspect most of them can't explain how they know what they know, but most of them vaguely know it anyway.
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Whats all this problem with punctuation and stuff i dont understand it makes no sense
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Ok: "It was a nice day. We went to the seaside." is correct. "It was a nice day, we went to the seaside.", while commonly used, is a gramatically incorrect substitition of a comma for a full stop. That's a comma splice, welding together two sentences that should technically stay separate :)
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Sorry, for some inexplicable reason i missed the irony in your sentence above, please accept my humble apology's, I hope your not one of the peoples' who are guilty of crime's against the great Gramer God G'or"ou,,su.!o!r, may all the unbeliever's burn in a great fire off tormented punctuation mark's especially sharp pointy commers
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I always use comma splices. Except when I don't. Then I don't.
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i'm sorry - but does anyone really care about "proper" punctuation and shit here..? i mean it's about as casual as it gets for the most part so i don't see the problem - why bother writing "i just farted" correctly - the message gets through
On the other hand, if there is a more formal point to be made, or a somewhat serious discussion, I can see the importance of at least trying to follow correct style. It's hard to be taken seriously if you can't even be bothered to put a little effort into your ramblings. While paying attention to the rules has its place, I think most of the threads and posts here are perfectly fine with all disregard for the rules.
yer 8th grade english teacher ms. thornbush ain't hoverin' over ya with her red pencil so fuhgedaboudit
EDIT: except for the wrong use of your / you're - that shit just pisses me off ☺
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The video reminds me a little of the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", although that particular example never made it into the final printed edition :)
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Haha! Sounds like I might have to track that down...
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_> If I had to guess, he's "teacheing" grammar to Chinese kids in China.
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He's certainly bad enough at it that I wouldn't want him teaching anyone. He's using commas at places they don't need to be and leaving them out where they're needed.
Also, in case that was confusing, my Chinese students had just transferred from China, so English was not their first language.
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Could be way off beam, but I suggest he is being ironic with his use of grammar?
While the grammar buggy has hit a haystack, snapped its axle, and several hens have set up nests in its innards, it's full steam ahead for the irony bandwagon in this thread....
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Good on ya. Sounds like an interesting placement :)
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It makes a difference
Also for you wankers
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