Friday 20 May 2011

The apostrophe within LA Noire

My excuse for posting this comes within the last paragraph of the article rather than the content, and it's a surprising instance of apostrophe abuse in a broadsheet newspaper:

"Well, I played with friends and there was much shared attention and debate over suspects' behaviour. But no matter how sharply focussed you and your friends' cheater detection modules, MacGuffins, red herrings, and double bluffs lurk in both the shadows of Cole Phelps' mind and in the dark corners of the game. You better fasten your seatbelts, because all you Cole Phelps' out there are in for a bumpy ride."

The plurals 'friends' and 'bluffs' and 'corners' are fine of course, and the plural possessives 'suspects'' and 'friends'' well handled with the apostrophe after the -s. They handle the possessive on 'Phelps' in 'Cole Phelps' mind' with equal accuracy. Why do they feel they need to bung an apostrophe on 'all you Cole Phelps' out there' though?

Glass - glasses. Pulse - pulses. Octopus - octopuses, unless you go all Latin. (Surely never Octopus' though!) So Phelps - Phelpses.  Nyeh.