Oh, How Darling!

which means maybe the centaurs have picked up on the fact that hey, sometimes when shane wants ilya to stop doing something, he taps his arm twice. or if ilya wants shane to move one way, he taps him three times. or if he just wants his attention, its a squeeze. which is all relatively normal, and they probably think its cute that they have an unspoken language for communicating with one another.

I had to learn this shit! I remember being in english class and explicitly being told that the apostrophe is for possessive. And if you’ve got a name like Marcus, then it’s «Marcus’» not «Marcus’s». I’ve made peace with people getting this one wrong, it’s unintuitive, I get it. But the plural peeves me to no end. Do kids not learn this in school? Do you only learn it if you’re in english classes for non-native speakers?

And it’s become so ubiquitous that I just know it’s gonna be accepted as correct in a couple decades/centuries - until the dictionary catches up. Correct language is the language that people use. And I mean, sure, I can understand what they’re trying to say, so it’s not that big of a deal. But I just know it’s gonna become another one of those things that makes english not make any sense, “Why is this a rule in english? Because fuck you that’s why” and you’re gonna need a linguist on tiktok to explain why some plurals have apostrophes and some don’t. It’s not even unintuitive, can they please proofread their fics that they post, if not their comments and dms??

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Marcus' vs. Marcus's is a stylistic choice. Just keep it consistent within a single work.

This other thing is called a greengrocer's apostrophe and it is a plague.

To be fair, when I've looked at the RAE dictionary, it has a lot of "This term is used only in Bolivia" and a lot less "How dare you borrow internet words from English!!!!"

(But I suppose I might as well ask: if you have one single authority, when should I use el voseo: never or always? You can only pick one!)

--

Anyway, for my many non-native English speaker friends out there, I wasn't joking about the peasant thing.

Yes, lots of highfalutin European stuff was in Latin until recently, but some European languages were at least a language of power some time before the last five minutes. English kings spent a good few centuries speaking French and not giving a toss about English. Even after the courts and such went back to being in English during the middle ages, we retained a giant inferiority complex towards Latin and French and a lot of standards for English didn't get codified until the last few centuries. The US in particular decided to make up lots of new spellings to prove how not English it was. Now that the US is very, very powerful but obviously not the origin of English, it's impossible to go back to a state where a single authority would be possible.

The result is that our authorities are several, and they're often more descriptive than prescriptive, like the OED or Merriam-Webster, or they're style guides that are telling you how you should write to match their standard but aren't necessarily ruling out other standards existing, like the Chicago Manual of Style.

250 years feels just like yesterday (to Frieren)

Happy (early) Fourth of July! 🇺🇸🥳

Winry: STOP CALLING ME THAT TO PEOPLE!

[sanji's pov]