John Salmon wrote:

"Mizter T" wrote
I did consider that as my defence but as you say logic would suggest
the inclusion of two apostrophes, so I decided not to as I would've
been caught out by the sharp eyed readers here on utl!

I'm glad you're getting to grips with apostrophes. It was you who posted
this, I think:

"Plus has Sudbury Hill Harrow looks like it loses it's 'limited service'
station
symbol simply because it's incompatible with the 'interchange station'
symbol"

Those are indeed my words from June '05. I do very much hope that you
haven't been silently brewing over my apostophe faux-pas for the past
year, and instead came across the aforementioned text by using a Google
search of the utl archives ;-)

(The erroneous "has" in my post about Sudbury Hill Harrow appears to be
an artifact unintentionally left over from my first draft.)


Ignoring the strange grammar, I would comment as follows:
"it's incompatible" is ok, because it's = it is;
but "it's limited service station symbol" is definitely NOT ok, because the
possessive its should NEVER include an apostrophe.
See http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/its.html


Point taken! I'm aware of the rules of the apostrophe, but it seems
this particular one isn't quite hard-wired into my brain. The webpage
is a useful reminder.

In my defence I'd say that I do attempt to communicate clearly whenever
I post here, however my somewhat lackadaisical approach to
proof-reading is in part a result of a wariness of spending too much
time on usenet. After all, newsgroups are hardly an exemplar of perfect
prose!

So I can promise more imperfect (though hopefully at least partially
comprehensible) contributions in the future.