Surely it should be grocers’ apostrophe due to the multiplicity of grocers?
/Pedant
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You maybe technically correct (the best kind), up to a point.
However, the grocer in question (responsible for the grocer’s apostrophe) is a singular metaphorical grocer, hence the original punctuation.
Further, it is THE grocer’s apostrophe. One (possibly metaphorical, but undeniably real) apostrophe. One apostrophe cannot be shared by multiple grocers.
Saying “the grocers’ apostrophes” would have rendered you more technically correct.
(TL;DR? A multiplicity of grocers requires a multiplicity of apostrophes, irrespective of how said grocers may use them.)
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Surely it would be apostrophe’s?
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The apostrophe’s WHAT, EXACTLY?
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The term is apostrophopodes, to avoid confusion
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Apostrophe’s multiplicity, of course!
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You are, indeed, today’s winner.
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But I did not say “A multiplicity of grocers requires the apostrophe’s multiplicity”
Had I done so I would have used the correct formulation, as above.
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My work here is done
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(Linked to popular posts of the year, because the current front page of that subreddit is just spammed with this crossword.)
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I scrolled through there a bit, the majority are people seeing the symbol in things like people see Jesus in potato chips. I can’t tell if the whole thing is sarcasm or if people are really looking deep for the symbol.
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It also looks a bit like some Dutch windmills, and certain Chinese Chippendale furniture.
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When will the NYT crossword designers grow out of quadrilateral symmetry?
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Pareidolia is the word you’re looking for, and yep, that’s all the Reddit is. It’s still sorta fun though, because pattern matching (especially faces) is what humans are hard wired to do. We do it very very well. Patterns don’t imply meaning, of course, which is where we go wrong so often.
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So nobody should sell a fan that happens to have four blades?
I seem to remember them being called “diagramless” puzzles. I enjoyed solving them, but I haven’t seen any like that in a while.
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You can avoid that by not letting them get wet, or feeding them after midnight.
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What a happy little wall socket; that really perked me up, thank you.
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Yes, you are correct. I couldn’t remember the name and made up “blockless” on the spot.
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