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Sunday, October 09, 2005

My biggest problem with SCOTUS nominees

I'm just going to lay it out for you all. I have big, big problems with new Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice nominee Harriet Miers. But my biggest concern, the biggest issue for me, has nothing to do with ideology or qualifications, or anything of the sort.

It's about apostrophes.

I'll level with you: Apostrophe abuse and misuse is perhaps the single greatest threat facing the blogs. And I won't close my eyes and pretend that George W. Bush hasn't sold us down the river on this score. He has made it much, much worse for bloggers to do their jobs, and he's made it much, much harder for punctuation sticklers like me to read the blogs without throwing things in frustration.

Repeat after me: All singular nouns take apostrophe-s to show possession. Period. Full stop. End of sentence. With the exception of some traditional fudging for historical names (as in the famous "for Jesus' sake" example from Strunk & White), every singular noun--including proper nouns that end in s--needs apostrophe-s if you are using the possessive.

So, it's now Roberts's court. The Senate will consider Miers's nomination. Got it?

And jeebus help you if I see Robert's or Mier's on your blog.

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