The Militant Apostrophe Protection Society

Pangram Muddle Winners

parkmaps — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:02:32 +0000

1. My sad vixen joined the forgotten lucky zebra power quest!

2. The queen just zoomed by examining her wristwatch forlornly plainly chugging vodka.

3. Zebras with ultra-violet choke pretty fragile quailing Jewish Mexicans.

Honorable mention:

Bob Dole fights jumping wax cars with kicking zebras and very fizzy turtles quietly.

MAPS Maddening Muddle: Wordoku September ’07

parkmaps — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:52:37 +0000

To our chagrin (disappointment, yes Lindsay had to look up the word), our wildly popular wordoku muddles were themselves found to be muddled (a.k.a. fouled up). Here’s the corrected version along with the (correct) answer key (both are in .pdf format which requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to load and print). If you find any more errors, please let Emma know (egrdog@yahoo.com).

MMM Wordoku_Sept07

MMM Wordoku_Sept07_answerkey

Shared versus Separate Possessives

parkmaps — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 17:38:14 +0000

Do you ever wonder, as you’re writing your term paper, whether to say “Clark’s and Sacagawea’s mooseskins” or “Clark and Sacagawea’s mooseskins”? Maybe you don’t, but this is a question of shared and separate possessives, and knowing how to punctuate your sentence so it says what you want to say is very useful. Here are some handy examples that will explain shared and separate possessives:

(1) Emma disected the pig with Jeff and Vicki’s daggers.
(2) Emma disected the pig with Jeff’s and Vicki’s daggers.
(3) Emma disected the pig with Jeff and Vicki’s dagger.
(4) Emma disected the pig with Jeff’s and Vicki’s dagger.

In 1, Emma disected the pig using multiple daggers which were all owned by Jeff and Vicki. In 2, Emma used some daggers that were Vicki’s and some daggers that were Jeff’s. In 3, Emma used a single dagger owned by both Jeff and Vicki. Even though the sentences only vary by an apostrophe “s” here and there, you can see that this makes a big difference in what the sentences mean. Any of these three options work, depending on whose daggers Emma was using and how many.

Number 4 does not work because there is only one dagger and the punctuation tells us that it is only Jeff’s and only Vicki’s, and since this is clearly impossible, the sentence is punctuated incorrectly.