too much typing—since 2003

8.17.2004

the crux of the biscuit

I don't know why apostrophes give people such trouble - they're really only used in two rather simple situations - but what's got me curious lately is a rash of properly formed apostrophes showing up where they don't actually belong. And I'm not sure whether this is a typical thing, or just a Milwaukeeism. What I'm talking about is adding an apostrophe-s to the names of places that don't properly have them. This is a bit understandable when the name is a proper name anyway - for example, a restaurant called Sanford that gets referred to as "Sanford's" - but a bit more mystifying when the place has a fully developed name - as in Cafe Lulu being called "Lulu's" (no, no one named Lulu is involved with the place) - and even weirder when the name of the place isn't a name at all: Trocadero -> Trocadero's, Vivo -> Vivo's, or for you chain-restaurant fans, Chipotle's or Panera's.

Can anyone help us out here at Architectural Dance Society's?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm totally hornswoggled to hear you say this is a new thing to you -- when I moved from Madison to Boston ten years ago I started hearing it, and over the course of about a year I went from thinking of it as some crazy east-coast thing to figuring that it was universal, but rare, and mostly seen in casual speech.

If you're just hearing it now, maybe it IS regional. On the other hand, Pizzeria Uno (a Chicago chain) actually refers to itself as "Uno's" on menus. Maybe Conrad Uno bought them.

- JJRJ

2fs said...

I'm not sure it's a new thing to me - just that, for some reason, it entered into my awareness more recently. (That sounds very new-agey, doesn't it...) It would surprise me not at all if someone told me, hey Jeff, you were talking about that ten years ago!