Spelling: English (UK) versus English (US)

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by HarryT

British English for British books; American English for American books. That's what seems right to me.

Yeah, that !

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by lindsayw

The Greengrocer's Apostrophe is not just a Brit thing! But add contractions to it and you see (in Australia) Avo's 3/$1 - Yuck! That's avocados, btw. Or should I say "it's avocado's"?

Surely, in that case, the apostrophe is merely indicating that some letters are omitted, and is not indicating a possessive.

So Avo's is correct, but Avocado's is not.

[HarryT]

The restaurant at work advertises "Panini's", which is wrong for two entirely different reasons, of course .

[DMB]

My bugbear is "lbs" for "pounds". The Latin word librum (pl. libra) is abbreviated to give "lb". But that is also the correct abbreviation for the plural.

[Pinecone]

I can live with the author writing in his/her own "language." But if a British author is writing a story set in the US, with US characters, he/she should write in US style and vice versa.

As for improper word choice/usage, ones that drive me nuts (or at least more nuts) include:

your/you're - Your is possessive, You're = You Are a contraction

to/too/two - Too is similar to Also. Two is a number.

In spoken - Can/May - When a person asks, "Can I help you?" I normally respond with, "I don't know, CAN you?"

[SeaBookGuy]

Originally Posted by DMB

My bugbear is "lbs" for "pounds". The Latin word librum (pl. libra) is abbreviated to give "lb". But that is also the correct abbreviation for the plural.

This reminds me of an acquaintance who cringes at the plural "paninis" (for Italian sandwiches) - when a term enters English as a "loan word" it can have the plural "s", so "lb" as a plural seems to me applicable to Ancient Rome (and I suppose the 7-11 in the Vatican).

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by DMB

The apostrophe s for plurals is known in Britain as the "greengrocer's apostrophe", presumably because practitioners of that trade would put out handwritten notices in front of their shops saying things like "juicy plum's 1s 6d per lb".
British writer Lynn Truss wrote an amusing book about misuse of punctuation.

I read this book several years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy. However, I think I remember this book discussing that it was more common to use apostrophes with acronyms and dates (like the 1980's) and other plural non-words in America than in England. Differences in how we use punctuation with quotes (e.g. period/fullstop inside or outside) or the use of single versus double quotes are other items that stick in my memory from this book.