Michael McIntyre wrote:
>
> It's worse in Britain than it is here. When I taught there in the early nineties the distinction had thoroughly evaporated. The error you found in your students' writing had made its way into the New Statesman.
>
> Michael McIntyre
>
> >>> joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com 04/25/02 05:35PM >>>
> This is soooo embarrasing...
>
> Starting in the mid eighties, I started to notice that a large percentage
> of my students confused the genitive with the plural ending: "Her parent's
> went to church. The grandmothers pies were the best." etc.
>
Note that we are dealing with a distinction that does not exist in the spoken language. There is no spoken difference between "grandmothers pies" and "grandmother's pies." So the offense is a violation of visual convention and of historical record (the ' if I remember correctly marks the omission of the "e" in the middle-english possessive).
So it's more a matter of etiquette or of marginal aesthetics than of "english." Carrol