What type of foam is ok to use?

I blame it on the spell-check mentality. Newsflash: It doesn't replace proofreading.

And I've heard that looser-boys like lose women.

I guess a lot of kids were absent that day in first grade.

The belief that you can teach a concept once and it will "take" with everybody in the class is wrong. It takes repeated teaching/learning to "fix" a concept, especially one as confused and messy as the Use Of The Apostrophe In English.

The apostrophe is an ambiguous sign. First, it signals the omission of one or more letters, which makes it a spelling sign. Second, it signals case and number, but the sound of singular and plural possessives is almost always the same, and posessives of course sound like plurals.

Third, the apostrophe is an inconsistent sign. There is no possessive apostrophe for pronouns, which contradicts the use for nouns and names.

Finally, there is the problem of phrasal nouns (such as mother-in-law), which more and more people are treating as compound nouns (ie as motherinlaw). How you apprehend such nouns determines where you put the apostrophe (and where you put the plural 's', too.)

A footnote: let's ignore tradenames and trademarks, which ignore all rules.

With such a farrago of ambguity and inconsistency, the amazing thing is that most people do use the apostrophe correctly most of the time, and a sizeable minority use it correctly all the time. Unfortunately, that rarely includes sign writers and menu composers. :-)

HTH, and that's the last of the OT nit-picking in this thread, I hope. :-)

Tell me about it! I had to learn this wonderful language at an age of sixteen! Many years later, and I'm still learning....

But Polish (my primary language) is no picnic either. :-)

I'm not even sure why I'm posting in such an OT thread.

Peteski

Or, even worse, pop and rap (collectively known as CRAP) groups that use diacritical marks because somebody must think they look cool - e.g. [minus the marks] Ton Loc.

Thread Drift R Us

Dew knot trussed yore spill chequer too fined awl thee missed aches.

Michael Brown spake thus:

You must have read that story, "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut".

No, I did not write that. Attribution got screwed up somewhere up above.

Fortunately people from the US speak a language that everyone speaks ( except maybe the French ), my 1st language is only spoken in a few countries so we have to learn 3-5 languages starting with English in I think 4th grade, followed by German and French in High School. Then to make it all a bit more complicaited evry 5-10 years they bring out a Little Green Book wich has all the new spelling methods and rules in it. For example character in Dutch used to be caracter , now its karakter because they think its better to have a letter K everywhere where its pronounced that way, this would be a good thing were it not for of course many excemptions. But thats enough OT for me .

Grtz Jan

that most people do use the apostrophe correctly most of the time, and a

Their mistakes are certainly the most obvious ones...