• Mr.'; Drop Database -- (unregistered)

    XKCD invented SQL injection jokes. All SQL injection jokes are references to XKCD -- even ones that predate the comic in question.

  • (cs) in reply to themagni
    themagni:
    Eric:
    Its Achilles's, technically. Myers's is right too. You drop the s after the apostrophe only for plural possessives. And there's only one Achilles.

    Incorrect. To form the possessive of a noun ending with s, you simply add the apostrophe. If you're using Internet English or perhaps a bastardized form of American English, I suppose you can put the apostrophes in wherever you want but you would still be wrong.

    My real life name ends with an s; I am quite certain of how to conjugate my own name.

    one parent owns a book: parent's book two parents own a book: parents' book Achilles owns a book: Achilles' book two heroes own a book: heroes' book

    To differentiate between the singular possessive and the plural possessive when both end with an s, you have to watch for the plural form of the root word. In the case of two people named Achilles, the plural possessive is Achilles'

    The question of indicating the genitive of a noun ending in 's' came up in The Times's feedback column the other week. A British broadsheet (in spirit if not actual size) can hardly be described as favouring "Internet English or perhaps a bastardized form of American English", but its style guide has this to say:

    The Times's style guide:
    Apostrophes with proper names/nouns ending in s that are singular, follow the rule of writing what is voiced, eg, Keats's poetry, Sobers's batting, The Times's style (or Times style); and with names where the final “s” is soft, use the “s” apostrophe, eg, Rabelais' writings, Delors' presidency; plurals follow normal form, as Lehman Brothers' loss etc. Note that with Greek names of more than one syllable that end in "s", do not use the apostrophe "s", eg, Aristophanes' plays, Achilles' heel, Socrates' life, Archimedes' principle.

    Beware of organisations that have variations as their house style, eg, St Thomas' Hospital, where we must respect their whim.

    I disclaim all responsibility for the positioning of commas in the above quote.

  • billswift (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward

    Actually singular words and names that end in s still get 's. You just use ' rather than 's after plurals ending in s.

  • Vermis (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    tster:
    Mel:
    Anonymous Coward:
    Anders Widebrant:
    Anonymous Coward:
    s/achille's/Achilles'/
    Or "Achilles", or "Achilles's"

    Ummm . . . no. Because it's referring to Achilles' heel (the heel that Achilles had). It was Achilles' heel that was his problem. Since it's possessive and already ends in 's', the apostrophe goes at the end with no "s".

    Captcha: vulputate

    FTFY
    you both fail. You DO put the 's' after the apostrophe on proper nouns even if they end in an 's'.

    Seriously people, if you are going to correct grammar, at least don't fuck it up yourself.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles%27_heel http://www.uhv.edu/ac/grammar/apostrophes.asp (see "Continuous S") http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/possessives.htm (Possessives of plurals and irregular plurals)

    Seriously, if you are going to correct grammar, at least don't fuck it up yourself.

    "Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact." - George Eliot (1819-1880) (I'll get blessed later)
  • Eric (unregistered)

    I wonder when they broke down and bought Shareplex...

  • Sascha (unregistered) in reply to L
    L:
    The end of the music industry as we know it: [image].

    Inspired by the mentioned XKCD cartoon ;-)

  • Sascha (unregistered) in reply to Anne
    Anne:
    Maybe you should get a job naming hair salons with clever puns. 'Cause lord knows we don't have nearly enough of them.
    that's nothing. We have a lot of dog salons here in Belgium which all seem to have English names. Unfortunately not all of these names are chosen with much care...

    I have once seen on (in Gent) with the beautiful name "Doggy Style"... :-)

  • Tim Rowe (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    Anders Widebrant:
    Anonymous Coward:
    s/achille's/Achilles'/
    Or "Achilles", or "Achilles's"

    Ummm . . . no. Because it's referring to Achilles' heel (the heel that Achilles had). It was Achilles' heel that was his problem. Since it's possessive, the apostrophe goes at the end with no "s".

    Not so fast. According to Fowler, "It was formerly customary, when a word ended in -s, to write its possessive with an apostrophe with an apostrophe but no additional s [...] In verse, and in poetic and reverential contexts, this custom is retained [...] But elsewhere we now usually add the s and the syllable---always when the word is monosyllabic, and preferably when it is longer". So the usual possessive of "Achilles" is "Achilles's". "Achilles' heel" doesn't have the additional s, not because it's possessive but because it's a stock phrase that has retained its archaic form.

  • Tim Rowe (unregistered) in reply to Tim Rowe

    Sheesh, I thought I'd clicked preview.

    s/with an apostrophe with an apostrophe/with an apostrophe/ ok?

  • urbansurgery (unregistered) in reply to alter3d
    "Close to more than"? Is that a synonym for "exactly" that I'm not aware of?
    it's from the same grammar book that gives us "Is Not Nothing"
  • (cs) in reply to Sascha
    Sascha:
    Anne:
    Maybe you should get a job naming hair salons with clever puns. 'Cause lord knows we don't have nearly enough of them.
    that's nothing. We have a lot of dog salons here in Belgium which all seem to have English names. Unfortunately not all of these names are chosen with much care...

    I have once seen on (in Gent) with the beautiful name "Doggy Style"... :-)

    I don't think that was a mistake...

  • IByte (unregistered)

    I love the impending sense of doom upon reading the customer's name and realising what (in the most nightmarish, WTF-est scenario) might be the problem enclosed in that name...

    (Now there's Bobby Tables with a twist...)

  • (cs) in reply to Uhh...
    Uhh...:
    JamesQMurphy:
    Because it is just so much fun to correct everyone's grammar when they screw it up.
    Do I detect a sentence fragment?
    Clippy, is that you?
  • Dugeen (unregistered)

    Apostrophe placing is a matter of orthography, not 'grammar'.

  • Keybounce (unregistered)

    Isn't there something more important to do than discuss the apostrophie?

  • (cs) in reply to obediah
    obediah:
    Is there an obfuscated sql injection anecdote contest going on, or what?

    blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah UPDATE blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah xkcd.

    You know, this would be an excellent way to deal with Warcraft spam. Just replace every occurrence of a Unicode point within the range of Chinese characters with the word "blah." What larks!

    avi to dvd shanghai escortshanghai escort blah blah blah blah blah blah google blah google blah google blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah paper-cutting machine.

    Now it looks like any other, red-blooded, 'Merican WTF comment. (Or English -- I'm cool with this.) Just like a haiku, but with added blah.

    Then we could feed it to the duck.

  • (cs) in reply to derula
    derula:
    Marc B:
    Mark Bowytz:
    Good work gang! Some to most typos are now fixed. But you all forgot that I misspelled bonuses as "bonues"
    Uh, isn't the plural of 'bonus' 'boni'?
    Only in some weird languages such as Latin, or German.
    Too many Landesbanken fuck-ups in German for anyone there to care how "bonus" declines.

    However, the plural of "bonus" in Latin is a wee bit contentious, since it's not a noun, it's an adjective. It therefore depends upon the gender of the referent noun. English doesn't just noun verbs (though with the easy availability of gerunds -- ablative absolute alert! -- it's never been clear to me why it should feel the need). In this case, English has nouned an adjective ... and we therefore have an Abstract Base Noun, a sort of Platonic noun-on-the-cave-wall if you will.

    Now, it could be feminine, in which case the plural would be bonae. But "I'd like a bona" just sounds wrong. "I'd-a like-a bona also, but she just-a say no."

    "Bonum" certainly sounds like what investment bankers have been doing for the last ten years, but then we'd be back in datum/data land.

    I reckon English just gives up, takes the default masculine option, and then co-opts English suffixes as usual. With or without apostrophes. There's a whole book by, I think, Jared Diamond on why this happens, but I can't be bothered to look it up.

  • (cs) in reply to urbansurgery
    urbansurgery:
    "Close to more than"? Is that a synonym for "exactly" that I'm not aware of?
    it's from the same grammar book that gives us "Is Not Nothing"
    You are both so asymptotically incorrect.
  • BooMonster (unregistered) in reply to Sascha

    Pics or it never happened...

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Ethan:
    And FWIW, "Charles" is a single syllable name.

    Uhhh... no, it isn't. "Char" is a syllable. "uls" is a syllable". "Char-uls" is two syllables.

    If you went by my sister's pronunciation, "Fred" is also two syllables: "fray-ud". But then she says "laigs" for legs and "yay-uh" for yeah.
    She hot?

  • (cs) in reply to Spelling Gestapo
    Spelling Gestapo:
    Sheer. Not shear.ludu

    Well.... the apparent offending bit of data WAS from a hairdresser who, presumably, uses shears.

  • Real-modo (unregistered) in reply to unshifted
    unshifted:
    I don't know why you're all discussing grammar as though it's black-and-white thing...
    That's 'cause of the recession; we can't afford to comment in colour any more.
  • methinks (unregistered) in reply to derula
    derula:
    Marc B:
    Mark Bowytz:
    Good work gang! Some to most typos are now fixed. But you all forgot that I misspelled bonuses as "bonues"
    Uh, isn't the plural of 'bonus' 'boni'?
    Only in some weird languages such as Latin, or German.

    Good grief, (wo)man... "weird languages"?!?

    A good part of your language - provided you are speaking english and not some weird ;-) language - is influenced by Latin, whereas basically it is Germanic (West Germanic, to be precise, just like German)...

    So, who is speaking a weird language here? ;-)

  • JayDee (unregistered) in reply to alter3d
    alter3d:
    sometimes spiking close to more than 2,000 on some days.
    "Close to more than"? Is that a synonym for "exactly" that I'm not aware of?

    I think he means it is exactly more than 2000.

  • the caecus (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    If you went by my sister's pronunciation, "Fred" is also two syllables: "fray-ud". But then she says "laigs" for legs and "yay-uh" for yeah.
    She Snoop Dogg?
  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Is this for real? Twenty comments and practically all of them about spelling and grammar errors? You people are pathetic.

    Most style guides suggest two spaces after a question mark.

  • (cs) in reply to the caecus
    the caecus:
    Code Dependent:
    If you went by my sister's pronunciation, "Fred" is also two syllables: "fray-ud". But then she says "laigs" for legs and "yay-uh" for yeah.
    She Snoop Dogg?
    I was thinking she sounded more Scarlett O'Hara than Snoop Doggy Dogg, myself.

    Or possibly Penelope Pitstop.

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    Piss off with your god damn casual discrimination!!! What the fuck is wrong with a red-headed stepchild you cretinous lump - fucking implications like these make my stereotypically huge temper boil over!!

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