Punctuation and Education and Suchnot (WAS: Ultimate Unofficial Guide)

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

Gulplum asked:

> Incidentally, and I don't mean to talk down to anyone but 
> I'm curious: do American schools not teach proper use of 
> apostrophes any more? 

Yes, they do -- or at any rate, they are supposed to.  It is a part 
of the curriculum.  Our schools, however, vary a great deal in 
quality.  Just because something is on the curriculum does not mean 
that it will be taught, and just because something is "taught" does 
not mean that it will be *learned.*  The enforcement of curriculum 
standards also varies widely from community to community.

Touching on David's point, there are obviously issues of money and 
class that come into play here.  It is easy enough to deplore the 
state of some of the schools, or to insist that all students be held 
to certain minimal educational standards.  It takes more than talk to 
find the funding to make it possible.

My fellow Oregon transplant Susanne wrote:

> The measures granting money for the schools always lose, 
> for some reason :(

I'll see your frownie face, and raise you one.  :( :(  

Oregon is particularly hard that way, I'm afraid.  We have an 
unusually democratic state constitution, and an unusually libertarian 
(and tax-hating!) populace.  It's an unfortunate combination when it 
comes to public funding.

Where are you in Oregon, btw, Susanne?  There don't seem to be too 
many people from our area around here at all.  I'm in Portland.

ER taught me a new term (a Briticism, perhaps?):

> Greengrocers' apostrophes have been with us forever - "Apple's 
> 2/6 a pound".

I have never heard the expression "Greengrocers' apostrophes" before! 
I do strongly associate that use of the apostrophe with food vendors' 
signs.  

I have the same association with the (often unwittingly ironic) use 
of quotation marks the Catlady mentioned earlier.  All too often, the 
word so treated is "fresh." "Fresh" meat.  "Fresh" vegetables.    

It's not very encouraging, no.  ;-)

I think that often those quotation marks are intended to convey 
emphasis, much like *asterisks* are often used on the Net.  At other 
times, I get the impression that people are using them to indicate 
that a word or phrase feels in some sense unnatural -- formal, 
formulaic, cliche, advertising-speak.  This use of quotation marks 
often seems to me to indicate that the particular phrasing was not 
actually at all idiomatic for the *writer,* but was used anyway 
because the writer considered it the proper or "educated" or 
otherwise socially acceptable way to express the concept.  I suspect 
that the Catlady's "temporarily removed for study" might fall into 
this category.  

Then there are other times, though, when I just have no idea what the 
Mystery Quotation Marks are trying to convey.

Catlady:

> There were plenty of public displays of bad grammar and bad 
> spelling, and many signs in many shops that used apostrophe-S to 
> indicate a plural, and (*my* pet peeve) quotatation marks around 
> words that probably should not be there, such as the card in a 
> museum vitrine explaing EXHIBIT "TEMPORARILY REMOVED FOR STUDY" -- 
> whevever I see that, I say "Do they mean that the exhibit has been 
> stolen and they want to hush it up?" -- long before there was an 
> Internet or an ARPAnet, let alone a Web.

It does sound rather as if the exhibit had been stolen!  Or perhaps
as if the person who wrote the card didn't have much faith in the
diligence of the students -- although then, I suppose, it would have
been EXHIBIT TEMPORARILY REMOVED FOR "STUDY."


Elkins