Monday, June 17, 2019

Grocery’s

Curtis Honeycutt on weird and wonderful practice of adding -’s to the name of a grocery store: Aldi’s, Kroger’s, Meijer’s, &c. He missed my favorite: Jewel’s, which might also be heard as the value-added plural Jewels.

comments: 9

Richard Abbott said...

I was curious about the "weird and wonderful practice of adding -’s to the name of a grocery store" but sadly the Circleville Herald is so security-conscious about its news that it cannot be access from over here...
"451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time."

Ah well. And I thought it was only personally-identifiable data that GDPR touched upon, not curiosity about apostrophes...

Michael Leddy said...

That’s a drag. How about this newspaper? His website has a map with links to the papers that publish his column. Maybe one of them will work. Sooner or later the column should show up at his website.

Richard Abbott said...

No luck so far but he has a nice website :)

Slywy said...

Here I think I'm more likely to hear "the Jewel," as "I'm going to the Jewel for milk — want anything?"

Michael Leddy said...

I’ve heard “the Jewel” too. Maybe the is a hangover from people saying “I’m going to the grocery store.” There’s a Reddit thread about the possessive (examples from the U.S. and the UK) that has examples of the — “the Walmart,” and so on. I was hoping there might be a link to an article from a linguist, but no.

Elaine said...

My mother-in-law always said "WalMart's." ....sort of like Chinese water torture. Likewise 'tassel" was pronounced "TAWsul"....and she corrected me every time I said "Lunch" instead of "Dinner." (The latter, I thnk, is regional, or at least generational.)

Michael Leddy said...

I think I need to visit the Dictionary of American Regional English to look up dinner and supper. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, lunch was lunch (the school had a lunchroom and “lunch ladies”), but other kids ate supper. Our family had dinner. I remember that supper to me always sounded wetter — like soup, I guess.

zzi said...

It's suppertime, so can we all sit down and have our dinner.

Michael Leddy said...

There’s a good compromise.