apostrophes – St. Eutychus

Tumblrweed: Bad Jokes for/from kids

I couldn’t figure out where the apostrophe should go in bad kid’s jokes. It’s ambiguous. Some of them are from bad kids. Some are bad jokes. Some are bad jokes for kids.

Here’s the premise of this pretty fun site.

“I moderate jokes on a Kids Jokes website. A lot of joke submissions can’t be published because they’re offensive (to kids, or to parents who would hear them repeated at home), or they don’t make sense… so I publish them here instead. I have not edited or made up any of these jokes.”

Here are some samples from the front page.

Peas

WHAT DOES PEAS EAT?

TOAST

Black and White

Q.what do you call black and white, black and white, black and white ,grey, red????
A.A penguin rolling down a hill, hit a rock and DIED!!!!!!

Girls

why are girls freaky?

beacuse they have long hair and there stupid.

Chickens Stop

why did all the chickens stop?
because a fat cow was about to put her bum on them

Zombe

what do you get if you cros a zombe and a persen?

dead!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

December 16, 2012

How to fix your Homophonia

Are you scared of words that sound the same?

The Oatmeal’s resident genius is at it again. Clearing up English mistakes and helping you be less dumb.

First it was the brilliant apostrophe chart – now it’s words people commonly mix up (there are a few more).

December 31, 2009

To ‘postrophe, or not to apostrophe

Continuing in my campaign for better apostrophe use comes this news story about a man in England who has taken the unusual path of adding apostrophes to signs.

The most significant problems with apostrophe use involve the overuse – but this guy wants to ensure they don’t die out altogether…

“The 62-year-old’s defence of the apostrophe comes after Birmingham council announced it would scrap the punctuation from council signs for the sake of ‘simplicity’.”
Mr Gatward, who served for four years in the Gordon Highlanders in the 1960s, is not just a campaigner for the apostrophe.

He will not join the ‘five items or less’ queue at the supermarket, in protest that the sign should read ‘five items or fewer’.

He also gets annoyed when people-neglect the ‘Royal’ in ‘Royal Tunbridge Wells’, and was vexed when he saw a major chain store advertising sales with signs saying ‘until stocks last’ rather than ‘while stocks last’.

‘I fought for the preservation of our heritage and our language but some people seem happy to let that go. I’m not,’ he said.

Apostrophic flow chart

If you’re still struggling with apostrophe use check out apostrophe.me for a series of flow charts and nicely explained graphics. Here are some of them. There are a couple more.

Here’s the golden rule of apostrophe use.

November 5, 2009