What's Happened to Good English??

[Terry]

I'm just a tad late on this one.

I must admit I'm pretty wayward with my use of Apostrophes; like most I can handle the simple ones like it's etc, but it's often guesswork after that.
Here's one for you. 'I sense their spirit's still dwell here' It's plural but does it need an apostrophe as used here?

Cheers Terry

[Heather]

No.

Spirit - singular.

Spirits - plural.

spirit's - possessive eg spirit's voice

spirits' voices - more than one spirit

Apostrophes aren't that hard really once you learn a couple of rules.

[David Campbell]

If in doubt, ask yourself a question, Terry...is there any possession involved? If there is, you'll need an apostrophe, and the only question is where to put it.

Heather gives one example, and here's another: "The cats paws scampered across the pavement." Where's the possession? The paws either belong to one cat or more than one cat, so we're talking about "the paws of the cat" or "the paws of the cats". That tells you where the apostrophe goes. In the first case it's "cat's paws", in the second it's "cats' paws".

If there's no possession and it's just a plural, as with "paws", there's no apostrophe.

Cheers
David

[Terry]

Thanks David and Heather, that's the way I thought it was.

It's just that in this case here, the sentence refers to the spirits of many people.

The whole sentence by the way goes 'I sense their spirits still dwell here; I guess they always will.'


Terry

[Heather]

In this case Terry, the spirits are plural - hence the "s" on the end of the word spirit.

It's not spirit's (or spirits') because the spirit or spirits don't "own" anything.

[Terry]

Thanks Heather
That's how I had it for the same reasons you point out here,
But wouldn't have bet too much on it being right.

If only I'd of paid more attention to Sister Etna - might have saved me getting the cuts so often as well?

Terry

[keats]

Thank's y'all.

Ne'il

[Heather]

Have confidence in yourself Terry.

[Neville Briggs]

Yeah, be a confidence man, I've met a few of those.

[Shelley Hansen]

Couldn't resist sharing this one from a Facebook Buy/Swap/Sell site:

High heals. ONLY WARN TWICE. Very comfortable.

Exactly as posted - including the upper case. Be warned!!