Wednesday, September 17, 2008

100's of Apostrophe Catastrophes

A reader named Lisa informed me that Woman's Day keeps committing punctuation errors on its covers. She wrote to the editors to complain that they had written "Save $100's." They never responded to her e-mail and repeated the offense the next month ("100's of recipes"), along with "Save $1,000's"! Perhaps "Save $1,000,000's" will be next?


Thanks, Lisa!

Even without the apostrophe, this construction bothers me because it looks like it should be read as "one hundreds." Thoughts?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, I am so relieved I found you...I was afraid everybody else just decided not to care anymore. Now I have an outlet for my astonishment at our inability to use our own language correctly.

Anonymous said...

I agree, I always think 'one thousands' when I see that. It's why I get so confused when packets of hundreds and thousands are called '100s and 1000s.' Or worse, '100's and 1000's.'

Anonymous said...

I've always objected to using "1000s" or whatever and think it should be spelled out as in "thousands".

Becky said...

Me too, unless you're talking about cigarettes.

Anonymous said...

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