Language rants, anyone?

[annc]

Originally Posted by Steve Rindsberg

Today's contribution (though it's more like every damn day's sighting):

monthslong
yearslong
etc.

I actually saw the first one hyphenated:

blah blah lorem ipsum month-
slong

NO. Just NO.

Oh, I'd have a heap of fun hyphenating the words before the 's' as you did in the last one. I started writing this reply to say I wanted to do that before I saw what you had done …

Great minds, etc.

[woody649]

I'm sure all you who have spent any time at all on the internet must have noticed that the internet rule is "Every word ending in 's' must have an apostrophe preceding the s."


It apparently no longer matters whether or not it's a possessive, or a contraction. If it ends in 's,' it gets an apostrophe.


Then there's my favorite, probably foisted upon us as a result of a generation raised according to Hooked on Phonics: WALLA!










[Used when the person means "Voila!" but has never seen the word in print, only heard it spoken.]

[Steve Rindsberg]

While the internet has, alas, solidified the use of these misplaced bits of pixel-ink sufficiently that descriptive grammarians will no doubt soon insist that they're correct, we can't place the blame squarely on the internet.

cf Greengrocer's apostrophe, aka "apostrofly":
https://wordhistories.net/2017/12/19...he-apostrofly/