Posted by Joslynn on September 23, 2005, at 15:27:46
In reply to apostrophe rule..., posted by alexandra_k on September 22, 2005, at 20:33:38
I hate to confuse matters, but I work in the language field, and I really think it should be the person's, singular possessive, with the apostrophe before the s. I say this because you wrote THE person's, and using the makes it singular. The person, just one person. The individual. If you do in fact mean more than one person, than the word the needs to come out.
If you want, you could change it to people's, no THE, if you want it to be plural. Persons plural isn't that common and people sounds more natural. Sometimes you see persons plural in phrases like "persons of color," in which case, it is plural, because it refers to more than one person, not just THE one person. If you use THE before person, you are referring to one person, unless you delineated persons as plural previously in the sentence? The word the is "used as a function word to indicate that a following noun is a unique or particular member of its class." (webster's)
If in fact you really mean all people in general, then say people's.
Does that make any sense or am I confusing the matter more?
On a related topic, there was a new wave band in the eighties called The The.
poster:Joslynn
thread:558298
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050922/msgs/558563.html