Word of the Day

Berserk

adjective | ber-SERK

Berserk generally means “markedly out of control due to intense anger or excitement.”

It is often used in the phrase “go berserk,” which can mean either “become very excited” or “become very angry and often violent.”

“When the team scored the winning goal, the crowd went berserk, cheering and jumping up and down with excitement.”

Today’s Writing Tip

Functions of the Apostrophe

This post discusses the three primary functions of the apostrophe in the English language: the marking of the possessive case in nouns, the marking of the omission of one or more letters, and the marking of plurals of individual letters.

(The obsolescence of apostrophes with abbreviations is also discussed.)

Marking Possessives

Apostrophes are employed in conjunction with the possessive s, as shown in the following examples:

• singular common nouns: “the farmer’s daughter”

• singular proper nouns that end in s: “Chris’ job” or “Chris’s job” (depending on which style one employs)

• plural common nouns: “the farmers’ daughters”

• plural common nouns that end in s: “the dogs’ bowls”

• plural proper nouns ending in s: “the Thompsons’ party” (no s at the end of the name); “the Simmonses’ car” (es at the end of the name)

• compound words: “mother-in-law’s tongue”

• separate possession: “John’s and Jane’s houses”

• joint possession: “John and Jane’s house”

Note, in the case of proper nouns ending in s, there is a distinction between the first example, which refers to a party hosted by the Thompsons, and the usage of Thompson’s, which refers to something belonging to Thompson.

A lack of attention to this distinction is the cause of frequent errors in signage, as when a sign referring to the inhabitants of a residence reads, “The Thompson’s.”

This truncation of “the Thompson’s house” literally indicates that it is the house of the Thompson and, therefore, is incorrect; it should read, “The Thompsons” (or “The Thompsons’” to indicate that the sign refers to the residence, not the residents).

Irregular plural nouns such as mice are treated according to the pertinent rule above, as in “The mice’s whiskers twitched.” Also, nouns that are plural in form but singular in meaning technically take an apostrophe with no s (“the scissors’ handle,” though “the handle of the scissors” is easier to read and say).

This rule applies to similar proper nouns (“Highland Estates’ bylaws”). Another exception is in the phrase “for goodness’ sake.”

Attributive forms, as opposed to possessive forms, do not take an apostrophe (“veterans affairs”).

The distinction is subtle, but test for the correct form by determining whether the phrase refers to an entity that exists for a given group (“veterans affairs”) or belongs to it or is organized by it (“farmers’ market”).

Names of holidays should be styled according to who or what they honor: “Mother’s Day” is treated as such, for example, because although the day is for all mothers, one traditionally honors only one’s own mother (and perhaps, if one is wise, one’s mother-in-law), while Presidents’ Day commemorates all presidents. (“Veterans Day” is an anomaly.)

Insertion or omission of apostrophes is also inconsistent in proper names in general, especially in geographical locations (“Pikes Peak,” but “Martha’s Vineyard’) or names of entities such as companies and organizations (Barclays, but McDonald’s).

When an italicized term takes the possessive form, the apostrophe and the s are not italicized (as in “The Wizard of Oz’s enduring charm”).

Contraction

Apostrophes mark the elision of one or more letters or numbers, as shown in the following examples:

• don’t (“do not”)

• o’clock (“of the clock”)

• c’mon (“come on”)

• let’s (“let us”)

• l’il (little)

• OK’d (in place of OKed)

• ’tis (“it is”)

• will-o’-the-wisp (will-of-the-wisp)

• “rock ’n’ roll” (“rock and roll”)

• f’c’stle (forecastle)

• O’Hara (“of the Hara,” from Gaelic Eaghra)

• ’60s (1960s)

Many writers are confused about this function in some usage, erroneously apostrophizing possessive pronouns such as its (resulting in the erroneous it’s) and plural nouns such as apples (confusing them for possessive forms, as in a sign reading “Apple’s on sale”).

Also, plural possessives pertaining to time frames are often mistakenly rendered as singular possessives (“two week’s notice”) or as plurals (“two weeks notice”); the proper form is “two weeks’ notice,” because the notice “belongs” to two weeks.

(Note, however, the absence of an apostrophe in the phrase “two weeks late” because here, weeks is plural but not possessive.)

Another frequent error is confusion of the use of the apostrophe as the first character in a term.

When contracting a word by beginning with an apostrophe, as in ’tis and “rock ’n’ roll,” or when contracting a number representing a four-digit year to the last two digits, as in the last example in the list above, precede it with an apostrophe—not an open single quotation mark (‘)—but indicate a range of years with a plural s alone (1960s), not with an apostrophe and an s; reserve that form for possessives (“1960’s most significant event,” in which a year, not a decade, is under discussion).

Also, an apostrophe should follow a number, whether spelled out or in numeral form, only in a possessive sense or as a contraction, as in “The 4’s diagonal line is sometimes formed vertically” or “This hundred’s a counterfeit bill.”

Plurals of Individual Letters

An exception is made for using possessives to indicate plurals of lowercase letters, as in “Mind your p’s and q’s,” “Label the x’s and y’s,” and “There are two m’s in accommodate.”

Also, the first of these examples shows an additional exception, one to the style rule that letters are italicized when employed to refer to themselves, as in “Write an s in the square and an r in the rectangle.”

(Normally, plurals of uppercase letters do not feature an apostrophe—and are not italicized—as in “the three Rs” and “I got three As, two Bs, and a C on my report card.”)

Apostrophes with Abbreviations

Apostrophes at one time were employed with a following s to indicate plurals of nouns styled as initials followed by periods, as in M.D.’s to indicate more than one doctor or R.S.V.P.’s to refer to multiple responses to an invitation, because although those forms look awkward, M.D.s and R.S.V.P.s appear even more so.

However, the use of periods with initials is becoming obsolete, and an apostrophe in MDs and RSVPs is unnecessary. (Many newer coinages such as CDs and DVDs generally postdate widespread usage of periods in initialisms.)

Today’s Quiz

Question 1:

Which of the following sentences correctly uses an apostrophe to mark the possessive case?

a) The childrens’ toys are scattered around the room.

b) The Thompson’s are having a barbecue.

c) The dogs’s bowls need filling.

d) This is the farmers’ market.

Question 2:

Select the sentence that correctly uses an apostrophe with a number:

a) The Great Depression lasted through most of the 1930’s.

b) The number 8s loops are sometimes identical in size and sometimes different sizes.

c) Notably, 1939’s reputation as an annus mirabilis for filmmaking is well-founded.

d) His sabbatical was of six month’s duration.

Question 3:

Identify the sentence that correctly uses an apostrophe to denote the plural of individual letters:

a) Make sure to dot all your i‘s and cross your t‘s.

b) Mind your ps and qs.

c) There are three b’s in the phase “barbarians go berserk.”

d) The three R’s are reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Question 4:

Choose the sentence that properly uses an apostrophe with abbreviations:

a) We received 20 RSVPs for the event.

b) The MD’s are in a conference.

c) I have 100 DVD’s in my collection.

d) The CEO’s are in a meeting.

Question 5:

Which sentence correctly uses an apostrophe for either contraction or the possessive case?

a) It’s raining hard today.

b) The cars engine is making a weird noise.

c) Sarahs’ phone is missing.

d) Berserk’s is my favorite anime.

The correct answers are as follows:

1. d) This is the farmers’ market. (This sentence rightly uses the apostrophe after farmers, indicating that the market belongs to multiple farmers.)

2. c) Notably, 1939’s reputation as an annus mirabilis for filmmaking is well-founded. (This sentence correctly uses an apostrophe to indicate the possessive form of a single year.)

3. a) Make sure to dot all your i‘s and cross your t‘s. (This sentence accurately uses an apostrophe to denote the plurals of individual letters i and t.)

4. a) We received 20 RSVPs for the event. (This sentence correctly omits the apostrophe in the plural of the abbreviation RSVP, in line with current usage trends.)

5. a) It’s raining hard today. (Here, the apostrophe correctly contracts “It is” into “It’s.”)

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I have run my business from home since 1990, and all of my staff work at home. I’ve watched the debate over working from home avidly. It feels like a clear winner for me. I have crises at work like everyone else, and I do tend to work a lot. But I work a lot because I love what I do and I’m doing it from the comfort of my own home, with my three dogs and an international staff.

Bob Rubila

05/16/2025

An Australian study, conducted over four years and starting before the pandemic, has come up with some enlightening conclusions about the impact of working from home. The researchers are unequivocal: this flexibility significantly improves the well-being and happiness of employees, transforming our relationship with work.

The tangible benefits of working from home

The Covid-19 pandemic acted as an unexpected catalyst, propelling millions of people into the world of teleworking. What appeared to be a temporary constraint for many quickly turned into a revelation: the possibility of carrying out professional tasks outside the walls of the traditional office. Five years after this massive transition began, a team of researchers from the University of South Australia has come up with some valuable scientific insights. Their study, which was unique in that it began before the health crisis, tracked changes in the well-being of Australian workers over a four-year period, offering a unique perspective on the long-term effects of teleworking.

The conclusions of this large-scale research highlight that, despite the sometimes contradictory data inherent in the complexity of the subject, offering employees the flexibility to choose to work from home has significant benefits for their physical and mental health.

Sleep and serenity restored

One of the first things we noticed when we started confinement was an increase in sleep time: almost half an hour more per night for teleworkers. This gain is not insignificant. Before the pandemic, the average Australian spent around 4.5 hours a week travelling for work. Researchers point out that this commuting time is often correlated with poorer mental health and a poorer perception of one’s own health. According to this study, educing or eliminating these daily journeys, which are sources of stress and fatigue, therefore has a direct and positive impact. Although a slight increase in alcohol consumption was noted at the outset, the overall trend is towards greater well-being.

The time-saving equation: between productivity and personal life

What can be done with these precious hours saved on transport? The Australian study, like work carried out in Spain which suggests up to ten extra days of free time per year for teleworkers, shows that this time is reinvested in various ways. Some of it is devoted to more work, and some to family responsibilities or caring. Interestingly, around a third of this freed-up time is allocated to leisure activities. As the researchers point out, “by devoting more time to leisure when working from home, there are more opportunities to be physically active and less sedentary”.

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Healthier meals

Eating habits have also changed. The proximity of the kitchen may well have encouraged an increase in snacking. However, the study highlights a deeper trend towards healthier food choices. Consumption of vegetables, fruit and dairy products has risen, as has the preparation of home-cooked meals, a sign of increased attention to the quality of food.

Productivity and team cohesion: removing doubts

The transition to teleworking is not without its challenges and questions, particularly in terms of productivity and maintaining social links. The issue of teleworking productivity has long been a subject of debate. While some managers express fears about a drop in performance, sometimes pointing the finger at a lack of supervision, the Australian study, corroborated by other research, suggests that professional performance and productivity are maintained and even improved when employees work from home. Some experts also suggest that these assertions sometimes mask a lack of new management methods adapted to remote working.

One crucial point emerges from the study: the distinction between imposed and chosen teleworking. When working from home is imposed, as was the case during the strict confinements, mental health and well-being can suffer. On the other hand, when individuals choose to work from home, their well-being tends to improve significantly. This positive effect is all the more marked when employees benefit from the support of their colleagues and their company. Concerns remain about the impact on team cohesion, social ties at work and promotion opportunities. Although the connection between colleagues is more difficult to reproduce at a distance, the study tempers these fears by emphasising the stability, and even improvement, in performance.

Towards a new philosophy of work

The findings of this multi-year study call for a broader reflection on the organisation of work. Employees who work full-time from home or in a hybrid model report higher job satisfaction and well-being. This confirms the growing desire for greater flexibility and autonomy in managing one’s professional activity.

Working from home is not a universal solution, a one-size-fits-all model that can be applied to all situations. Rather, it appears to be a valuable option among others, capable of contributing to a better, more inclusive and flexible working environment. The researchers conclude that our approach to work must evolve, embracing the diversity of needs and lifestyles. It’s less a question of pitting face-to-face against remote working, and more a question of creating tailor-made solutions that benefit both employees and forward-thinking businesses.

What do you think?

Leave a comment

I’m not on Quora, but occasionally see grammar posts, and this one took me a minute to understand. This explanation is the best explanation I saw. It’s a good question, and once you understand the answer, I think it does contribute to “Grammar Mastery.”

If you’re on Quora, and you’re interested in grammar, you will probably find it interesting.

Grammar Mastery & Education Insights

Rick Coury

May 29

What is the best grammatical explanation for why “Give her her book” is considered correct, while “Give him him book” is not—aside from relying on how the sentence sounds to native speakers?

The first “her” and “him” in these sentences are indirect object pronouns.

Think of them as replacing nouns, e.g. “Give Mary the book.” “Give Jim the book”.

The second “her’ and “him” in these sentences should be possessive adjectives.

In the first sentence, the second “her” is a possessive adjective.

(We’re talking about her book.}

But the second “him” is not a posessive adjective. The possessive adjective needed is ‘”his”.

“Give hm his book.”

(We’re talking about his book.)

Q. Hello! In the examples in CMOS 8.48, can you clarify why Southern California, Northern California, West Tennessee, East Tennessee, and Middle Tennessee get capitalized, whereas western Arizona, eastern Massachusetts, southern Minnesota, northwest Illinois, and central Illinois do not?

A. Southern California and Northern California are capitalized because they have become recognized beyond their borders as the names of two geographic and cultural entities. East, West, and Middle Tennessee are capitalized as the names of the three “grand divisions” in that state, a usage that has become widely accepted; see, among other sources, the entry for “Tennessee” in Britannica. (Many sources style these as the Grand Divisions—with initial capitals—including this page from the Tennessee Historical Society. Tennessee’s state constitution, on the other hand, uses lowercase, and it doesn’t name the three divisions.)

As for the other examples in your question, each of those is more likely to be used generically (i.e., to refer to the western or other portion of a state) rather than as a proper noun. And though any of them might be capitalized in local usage (as in a travel guide extolling the virtues of a certain region), such usage shouldn’t necessarily determine your own (or that of your author). When in doubt, use lowercase for terms like western at the state level and caps for national or global regions.

Q. Would you use a comma after the verb read in fiction when written text is introduced by that word? Does it matter whether the text is presented as a sentence? For example,

The sign read Keep Out.

versus

The sign read, “Thank you for not smoking.”

As a copyeditor I am always unsure whether read is considered a variation of such terms as said, replied, asked, wrote, or the like. Perhaps I must consider whether the grammar and syntax of the quoted material is separate from the text that introduces it?

A. You don’t normally need a comma before words introduced by the verb read—or said, for that matter—used in the sense of “consisted of (or included) the word(s).” And though quotation marks are helpful in some cases, they can usually be omitted in favor of title case for shorter signs (see CMOS 7.64):

The sign read “Thank you for not smoking.”

or

The sign read Thank You for Not Smoking.

Use a comma only in the rare event that read is used as a speech tag (in which case the quoted words would be considered to be syntactically independent relative to the surrounding sentence; see CMOS 12.14):

I asked, “Could you tell me what that sign says?”

Squinting through the haze, she read, “ ‘Thank you for not smoking.’ ”

Note the nested single quotation marks, which clarify that the quoted speaker is quoting something in turn (see also CMOS 12.46 and 6.11).

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The Mind File

Miriam Reynoldson

Apr 19, 2025

So let’s get one thing out of the way: I think “AI literacy” is a dangerous device of neoliberal education and it deserves to be dismissed out of hand.

I don’t like that declaring this will immediately turn off half my audience, but I think it’s only fair to say it up front.

This has a lot to do with my feelings about generative AI technologies, their developers, their blood diamond genesis, and their ugly consequences for those who use them and those who are impacted by their use.

But it has a lot more to do with what literacy is.

Literacy: a potted history

Up to the mid-twentieth century, when people spoke about literacy they were talking about being able to use letters. It was an entirely mechanical concept that had everything to do with making and interpreting the marks of language:

Then, around the middle of the century, the concept of functional literacy was defined:

These definitions were developed for statistical purposes, in order to determine and track the scale of illiteracy in the world.

But although functional literacy brought with it the socio-cultural concepts of community participation and development, it was still itself defined by the narrow view of literacy as the skills of “reading, writing and calculation”.

In the fifty or so years since, we have begun to think of literacies in the plural, as a wide array of functionings essential to engaging in communication in the present world. Financial literacy, digital literacy and critical literacy are just a few of many examples.

The term multiliteracies was introduced in the 1990s by the New London Group, who argued that contemporary literacy education needed to account for:

Their point was that these forms were growing increasingly fragmented. In a global and multicultural present, reading and writing English words on a printed page simply wasn’t enough to claim literacy any more.

One of my favourite definitions of plural literacies is from James Paul Gee, who conceptualised literacy as discourse fluency. He wrote that:

Gee defined discourses as “saying (writing)—doing—being—valuing—believing combinations” (p. 6). In his view, a primary discourse is, simply, the one we’re born into: “All humans, barring serious disorder, get one form of discourse free” (Gee, 1987, p. 5). For him, that’s the oral communication between parent and child. It’s the first form of linguistic communication we learn. (For Helen Keller, who couldn’t hear or see, you could say that was hand-speaking.)

Every other discourse is somehow encrypted and must be unlocked to be read. Reading is an act of translation. Writing is the ability to synthesise that translation into new representations of the discourse.

Can you see how how in this view of literacy, “reading and writing” is a metaphor for all the ways in which communication can be culturally encoded?

• Academic literacy is the capacity to interpret and perform scholarly cultural signals to access and transmit academic knowledge.

• Financial literacy is the capacity to comprehend and engage with accounting terms, conventions and practices to manage and acquire money.

• Media literacy is the capacity to decrypt and encode messages through culturally-structured modes like news journalism, television, websites, this blog.

To underline this clearly, literacy is about communication.

So?

I’m giving this lecture because I am so, so, so utterly sick of the calls for embedding “AI literacy” in education and workforce development on the grounds that generative AI capabilities are somehow now essential for participation in the world.

First of all, they aren’t essential.

Second, they aren’t literacy.

Using AI is not about communicating. It’s about avoiding communicating. It’s about not reading, not writing, not drawing, not seeing. It’s about ceding our powers of expression and comprehension to digital apps that will cushion us from fully participating in our own lives.

Generative AI use is degenerative to literacy.

You could argue that what’s needed is “critical AI literacy”. We need to be able to recognise when this is happening, how, and why.

And I support what you’re trying to say, but pull the middle bit, please.

That’s critical literacy. That’s not new. And if it’s just occurred to you, I’m sorry to say you’re about half a century behind.

I’m happy to chat about how using generative AI doesn’t have to mean ceding all our powers of understanding and expression. Look, I’ve had students who have effectively used it as a scaffold to engage with a meaningful secondary discourse (academic literacy). And that’s wonderful. But it’s a scaffold, not the thing itself. My aim is for the student to achieve the actual skill. I’m genuinely ok with training wheels, but I ultimately want to see you ride without them. Because the irony is this: if you can’t ride without them, you can’t actually ride with them either.

Far more frequently, what I see is students attempting to integrate generative AI¹ into their workflows, and achieving regressive results. Demonstrating poorer critical literacy than before. Using poor judgement. In some cases, bordering on academic misconduct. And let me be clear, these uses are in good faith.

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The only thing that can remedy this is communication. Actual, non-outsourced communication. Banning AI is a way of communicating that this is bad and we don’t support it (although it’s entirely symbolic and unenforceable). Assigning poor grades is a way of communicating that the integration was unsuccessful (but punishes the student for earnestly trying to participate in a practice increasingly touted as essential).

There are all sorts of ways we can communicate with our students about generative AI.

But trying to sell them ‘“AI literacy” is a way that will actively hurt them.