S-aholics Anonymous

One of the craziest things about the English language is our bizarre dependence on the letter S. We give it way too many jobs.

* S has to work like any other letter, representing a specific sound (spill, brass, star).

* We also use S to form plurals (apple --> apples).

* We use it to form possessives (Pete’s car, Mr. Smith’s hat).

* We use it to conjugate verbs. (I walk, he walks. You think, she thinks.)

* And we use it to stand in for our most common verb in contractions (Joe is nice --> Joe’s nice).

Other languages don’t have this problem. For example, in Spanish, S is used to make plurals (un gato, dos gatos). But to show possession, Spanish speakers use “de,” meaning “of” (el gato de Juan = Juan’s cat). And Spanish doesn’t rely solely on S to conjugate verbs (yo hablo, tu hablas, el habla, nosotros hablamos, ellos hablan).

Italian doesn’t even use S for its plurals. It has a different system in which one horse -- un cavallo -- becomes i cavalli in the plural.

Our weird dependence on S is at the root of a good many mistakes. For example, when people write “I went to the Thomas’s house” (which should be Thomases’) or “The dog wagged it’s tail (which should be “its”) or “Ray let’s the dog on the couch” (which should be “lets”).

The only way to avoid these mistakes to keep track of whether your word is plural, possessive, both plural and possessive, a contraction, or a conjugated verb. And with all those pitfalls, it’s not hard to understand why someone could get so flustered as to think that one carrot plus another carrot equals two “carrot’s.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 14th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.