The Language Use and Grammar Curmudgeon

Funky did it again. I'd written earlier about my disappointment with my favorite cartoons. Baby Blues referred to a turtle as an amphibian. And, Pearls Before Swine (in my opinion, the most clever - well, ok, not MOST, but sharing the spotlight with Rhymes with Orange) had characters saying, "Alright", instead of the correct "All right".

Well, in Funky Winkerbean, there is a character named Les. If you need to make a word possessive, and that word ends in "s", it's correct to put apostrophe s. The writer had a character say something like "It's his and Les' thing." This is incorrect. It should be "It's his and Les's thing." I know it might look funny, but it's correct.

My boss's outfits are beautiful.

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• #2 Comment from debisabelEntry Author 
  4/5/08 3:20 PM | Permalink

  Wow. I had no idea it was acceptable. I’m very upset about this news. I can understand your logic about “ok, well, healthy” – that makes sense. But I'm still a traditionalist!
• #1 Comment from helmswondermom 
  4/3/08 6:03 PM | Permalink

  You know what?  I used to be very adamant about using only "all right", but I looked it up once and found that, though non-standard, "alright" is acceptable now.  I don't know when it became so, but it is actually in my newest Oxford edition.   I might use "alright" (in informal writing) to mean "ok, well, healthy", etc., but I will use "all right" to mean "all correct" or something.  I can actually see a semantic difference in context.  But in formal writing I would never use "alright".  It used to bug me a lot more than it does now.  
  Lori
  http://journals.aol.com/helmswondermom/DustyPages/