Police in Delaware found a 3 year-old boy wandering a busy Newark highway early on Tuesday. The kid was under the (alleged) care of the Little Scholars Center, whose sign proclaims "Where your childs lifetime learning begins."Apparently, the child's learning will not include the proper use of the apostrophe. Something tells me the kids are smarter than the people running the joint. Child is possessive, which is a concept lost on the Center, where no building is big enough to hold them.
Maybe a better slogan for the center would be, "Your Child's Journey Begins With a Single Step - Out the Door and Into Traffic." Or, "Where Your Child's Lifetime Ends." Better. You'll find the story here.
In several ways I'm glad I'm not a single parent. I'm way too neurotic to leave my children with anyone who isn't directly related, and even then, I'm probably on the phone every five minutes asking, "Is he still breathing?"
But I'm old, and come from a time when one parent worked and the other stayed home and reared the child. When dinosaurs roamed the earth. Unless you're an elected official or in pornography it's impossible to bring up a child on one salary. Ironically, often a second income is used to help pay for the day care. Strange. What happens when two salaries isn't enough?
Meanwhile, let's take bets on how much longer the Little Scholars Day Care Center remains in business. Thursday?
Jiffy Lube is hiring.
7 comments:
As usual, you're right - and I hope you don't hate it!
But, being the nagging former English teacher one more time, check out the "lets"!!
I'm a dinosaur myself. Or I'll become one.
Now that I finally made it and quit my abhorred teacher's job I obtained a commission to write a script for a children's audiobook on the topic of - tataa -dinosaurs. Not that I knew anything about this subject.
I know that they're extinct.
When I ran this essay through my head last night (I do that) I placed the apostrophe in "Let us" but figured it wasn't worth the effort to get out of bed, turn on the PC, log in and type ' and turn it off.
Maybe the owner is named Scholar and it should be "Scholar's Day Care?"
Little Eddie Scholar.
Oh ... And I can't edit these from work because the function is blocked, but I can post comments.
Odd.
I mentioned this post to the Grammar Vandal because I think it's brilliant and a wider audience should read it. Wouldn't you agree?
There could actually be an apostrophe in "Little Scholars Center", but it would have to be a plural possessive.
Grammatical question: Whose center is it? The center of the little scholars: Little Scholars' Center. Just saying. Dinosaur attitude.
The s-apostrophe is a concept that makes most people's heads spin.
There is a move afoot locally to eliminate the apostrophe from the names of municipalities. We have several like Penn's Grove, Carney's Point, etc. whose names would lose the punctuation. I think it's yet another sign of laziness.
We're teaching people that if we don't understand something, it's easier to ignore it or change the rule than to learn it.
That is sad.
Me too think that sad butt hisstory show that language change allways.
Post a Comment