What causes this?
Somebody posted a post further back a given thread with some French in it, so google translate (default=ON in chrome for me) translates all “French” words. Peter translates to “to fart” (does it really?) and Gallois translates to Welsh.
And here is another, showing the top level of British literacy, this time from an email sent to millions of customers:
Not just one mistake; this is elsewhere in the email. Lloyds is a sh*it bank anyway…
It does. I will never read your posts the same way again 
Other meanings are ‘to break, burst or explode’ (transitive verb), e.g. péter les plombs (‘to blow a fuse’, literally and figuratively)
or ‘to break something’ (transitive reflexive verb) e.g. se péter la geule (to smash one’s face)
In all fairness the rules for the combination of apostrophe, plurals, and words that end in S are terminally confusing. I’m pretty sure that this example is incorrect, but I think the following is correct: “Many businesses’ statements are online”.
The sooner we just forget the apostrophe altogether, the better.
johnh wrote:
I’m pretty sure that this example is incorrect
Hmm… Not a native speaker, but I can justify it.
Yes I can see this was their line of thinking but it is 100% wrong in actual usage over here.
Many businesses’ statements are online
That would be correct, when the plural of “business” is involved.
What makes me laugh is not the individual mistake. It is the huge vast enormous failure of the “corporation”. It is like when a major daily newspaper gets a type in a front page headline. Just think of how many people must have seen it…
“your business’ statements” is grammatically “the statements of your business” expressed as a genitive
The proper way to do that is “your business’s statements…” – i.e. you add the apostrophised genitive ending. Whereas when the noun is plural (and ends in s) then you can put the apostrophe afterwards. But honestly, how many people actually know that?
And for plurals that don’t end in s? Oxen? Men, women, children? Who knows?
Don’t you just add an apostrophe and an s.
Ie men’s, women’s, children’s?
But what would I know?
Ie men’s, women’s, children’s?
For sure. Not sure about oxen though.
True. I can’t think of a posessive noun that would follow a herd of oxes or oxen so should it be ox’s hooves or oxen’s hooves when talking of the group of oxes/oxen?
Always knew English was difficult. French should be the international language of aviation.🤣
gallois wrote:
French should be the international language of aviation.
We would all struggle with French numbers
