somniloquence

One of the reasons I started doing this was because I'd talked about this kind of stuff on the LJ before, and people kept asking me to explain more. I didn't want to do tutorials, because there are enough out there, and there are much better, more comprehensive books that I think people should get if they want to do more, better. But the thing I was good at was blowing away the myths and misconceptions about this stuff -- it's astonishing how much information is taught to us in school as "correct" when it's in fact incredibly wrong, and not even logically based, either. The apostrophe s on names ending in s is one and that's why it was one of my earliest posts -- I gave a little history on it in that post, because it was started as a way to save space in newspapers in the laster part of the 19th century. So the idea that it's correct is just laughable.

Sadly, what happens in most cases -- and I discuss this in my peeves post -- is that personal pet peeves are passed on to us by teachers, so we go on in the face of new information clinging to our little peeves, insisting they're "correct." This apostrophe s one is the worst, in my opinion. I started out thinking, like most editors, that I knew everything. I've since learned I knew almost nothing, and that most people think they know stuff, too, and never really get the chance like I did to learn just how much they still have to learn.