Dragaera

Updated pronunciation guide

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Tue Sep 28 18:19:26 PDT 2004

#On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 05:54:26 -0600, Howard Brazee <howard at brazee.net>
#wrote:
#
#> I just picked up the book _Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance
#> Approach to Punctuation_.   Looks like it will be fun.
#
#
#It is fun, but her publicized change is from "Two Weeks Notice" to putting
#an apostrophe after the s.
#
#She says if it is "One Week's Notice", then it should be "Two Weeks'
#Notice".   I can't argue with that, but why should she assume that "Two
#Weeks" possesses "Notice"?
#
#I say "One Week Notice", which is a "Notice that lasts One Week".   "Two
#Weeks Notice" is a "Notice that lasts Two Weeks".
#
#Or does she also say "Termination's Notice"?

You misunderstand the function of the vestigial genitive case in
English. Like the preposition "of", it is not limited to possession, but
can be used to describe other kinds of noun-noun relationship:
 - two dollars' worth of rice
 - a minute's thought
 - a day's wage

If you use "two weeks notice", with no apostrophe, to mean 'notice that
lasts two weeks', do you also speak of "the women room" and "the men
room" for 'the (rest)room for women/men'? Do you carry your books in a
books bag? Or your groceries in a groceries bag? For that matter, would
you ask for one dollar worth of rice? or, rather, would you have asked
for that before this discussion began, before you started thinking about
the question?

Notice that all expressions in the bulleted list are specifically of the
form
	number -- thing being counted -- possessive marker -- thing
being measured:

"Worth" in this expression is what is sometimes called a "measure word",
or in the grammar of languages such as Chinese or Japanese a
"(numerical) classifier". We only have a few of them in English, and
they are exceptions to the general grammar; another one is "head" as in
"5000 head of cattle".


By the way, I wouldn't say that "two weeks' notice" is notice that lasts
two weeks. It is notice that informs of a (particular) event that will
occur in two weeks. Similar is "10 minutes' warning", not to be confused
grammatically with "a 10-minute warning" (where the modifying phrase has
been hyphenated into an adjective, losing all number in the process,
like "a 10-foot pole").

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian,
   Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
   [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and
annoys the pedant. -- Lois McMaster Bujold, _Memory_