Happy Holiday's from the Weitz's? Nope. Here's your holiday greeting card punctuation guide

 

It’s time again for our annual tradition: saving people from making embarrassing mistakes like “Seasons greetings from the Russo’s,” “Happy Hanukkah from the Weitz’s” and “This will be baby Mile’s first Christmas!” on holiday greeting cards.

So before you head to your city’s last surviving stationery store (which, by the way, should not be written as “stationary store” unless you wish to emphasize that it’s not on wheels), read this primer on avoiding common mistakes on holiday greeting cards. Most of the errors you see on cards involve plurals and possessives of names.

Double that up by making a name plural possessive and your odds of getting it right are infinitesimally small. It’s all because the English language cruelly uses the letter S both to form plurals and to form possessives.

But for a side of cruelty with that cruelty, the S formulas apply only sometimes. Other times, apostrophes and even the letter E get thrown into the mix.

To navigate the minefield that is your holiday greeting-card list, the trick is to take it slow. Here's my column showing you the steps you need to take.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 25th, 2019 at 4:46 pm 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.