Wednesday, February 08, 2012

I can haz apostrophe?


Molly the Dog can't believe it. She thought the humans were supposed to be the smart ones.


Silly dog.

I suppose it would be too much to assume that the canine on the Milk-Bone box is named Mini. I suppose it's too much to assume that both dogs on the boxes of Milk-Bone "Mini's" answer to Mini.

And I suppose it would be a really gigantic stretch, at this point, to assume the United States hasn't become a nation of blithering illiterates.

OR THAT in another 20 years, as Americans devolve into communicating by a series of grunts and clicks, creatures such as my little friend Molly will come to be known as "the articulate ones."

For all I know, she already may have better mastery of the difference between possessives and plurals than your average U.S. high-school graduate.

Come to think of it, that may explain why, after giving the box of treats a good going over, Molly looked at me, cocked her little head and asked "What the hell, Dad?"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's what Milk-Bone (i.e. Del Monte) has to say on the subject (though this might just be a load of c'p) -



"Thank you for taking the time to contact us about the lettering on our Milk-Bone Mini's package. You are correct that an apostrophe does often indicate a possessive when accompanied by an "s" at the end of a word and Mini is not possessive. However, an apostrophe can also indicate an omission of letters. For example in the contraction "I'll" the apostrophe represents the omission of the characters " wi" from phrase I will. In the same way in the rendering of "Mini's", the apostrophe represents the characters "atures" from the word "Miniatures"."

Anonymous said...

Complete bullshit. The explanation provided further proves their editors are dumber than dogs.
Abbreviation
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For guidelines on making and editing abbreviation articles on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Disambiguation and abbreviations
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An abbreviation (from Latin brevis, meaning short) is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv. or abbrev.

In strict analysis, abbreviations should not be confused with contractions or acronyms (including initialisms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance.[1]:p167An abbreviation is a shortening by any method; a contraction is a reduction of size by the drawing together of the parts. A contraction of a word is made by omitting certain letters or syllables and bringing together the first and last letters or elements; an abbreviation may be made by omitting certain portions from the interior or by cutting off a part. A contraction is an abbreviation, but an abbreviation is not necessarily a contraction. However, normally, acronyms are regarded as a subgroup of abbreviations (e.g. by the Council of Science Editors). Abbreviations can also be used to give a different context to the word itself, such as "PIN Number" (wherein if the abbreviation were removed the context would be invalid).