hit and run communication #3

14 September 2006

hit and run communication #3

The apartment complex I live in has two signs that I see while I’m across the street waiting for the bus.  They both say “Apt’s” instead of “Apartments.”  I can’t figure out if this is the nongrammatical use of an apostrophe to form a plural (i.e., more than one (abbreviated) “apt”) or the quite grammatical, though nonstandard and not formal, use of an apostrophe to indicate the ellision of letters due to limited sign length (such as “int’l” for “international” or “gov’t” for “government”).  Both because I’m a cynical masochist (masochistic b/c I chose to live here), and because I’m not inclined to think that businesses should use shorthand on official signs that represent themselves to the world, I tend to presume the former.

Permalink