alt Hacker NewsYeah, but that's the same lax descriptivist school that also tell you "literally" and "I could care less" should somehow be accepted as the exact opposites, they're just wrong. :p
Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural? At what point does something that began as an unambiguous error become rescued by the popularity of the mistake?
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rerdavies • last Tuesday at 5:01 AM
The entire English language is a series of unambiguous errors that have been rescued by the popularity of the mistake. Were it not, we would be speaking some version of Ur-German.
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As we don’t have an official or authoritative body that determines “proper” English usage as other languages do, appealing to a dictionary strikes me as a mite better than prescriptivism or pedantry, though I don’t think was your intention either.
> Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural?
That’s entirely unrelated and uncontroversial; one is the plural of a “people,” as in multiple distinct groups of folks with shared culture, nationality, or other traits, whereas the other is the possessive form of a word that is already plural, so I’m not sure if that’s a red herring or if you’ve actually seen such incorrect usage being advocated for.