My shit is a little bit narrow (fix my apostrophe!)
I'm awesome at grammar, but it's a talent, not a skill: I do it in my guts, and I have to go back and think it through in order to tell you why something is right or not.
(I can usually do that, because I soaked up all the grammar I learned very easily, since it was just attaching rules to things I already knew - though my early education was pretty horrid, so I wasn't exposed to a lot that people who went to better schools were. …And no, this doesn't mean that every bit of English I write has perfect grammar; sometimes I get "entitled" about knowing how it should be, and change things because I feel like it; plus I like to experiment - especially with punctuation and word-formation - and sometimes I just go fast (ahem, quickly) or am lazy, like most people. That said, though, this post and my general disposition totally does give anybody the right to nitpick at me for any grammatical errors they may find in anything I've written, and yup, I'm okay with that.)
(Also, excessive parentheses are a stylistic mistake, not a grammatical one. ::sticks out tongue::)
So here's my conundrum:
- the phrase "a day's worth of stuff" contains a possessive form of the singular noun "day", which therefore has an apostrophe. The apostrophe goes in front of the "s" rather than behind it because "stuff" is a collective noun, I think, referring to the heap or chunk rather than the many items that compose it, and therefore gets treated as singular.
- the phrase "a day's worth of things" contains a possessive form of the singular noun "day", which has an apostrophe before the "s" even though the object-noun "things" is definitely plural - which is normal, so okay. But this establishes that when "day" is plural in this phrase, there's an apostrophe-s regardless of whether the object-noun is singular or plural
- both the phrase "many days worth of stuff" and the phrase "many days worth of things" seem (intellectually) like they ought to have apostrophes following the "s" in "days"…but "many days' worth of things" just looks wrong to me (a good sign that it is wrong!). Furthermore, Googling produces about a 80/20 preference for not using the apostrophe, including in well-respected publications! SO WHAT IS THE DEAL?
Ah, life mysteries. If only they were all so tiny as the waveform of an apostrophe….
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.