Welcome back to our In the Garden of Grammar Tour. Our first stop is the implement shed, where we PREFIX our implements. (We tillers of syntax soil will enjoy our little pun.) We polish our apostrophe tweezers, the ‘whole nother’ snips, the simple sentence edger, and our clause-grafter. We make certain the sprinkling can is filled with punctuation, and a high quality Oxford comma cultivator is ready. willing, and able. We load them all into the narrative wheelbarrow, along with loppers, fertilizer, pruner, shears and tendril adjusters. Because we value a tidy garden, we top it with a basket for pests and deadheads.

Once in the garden, we check immediately for apostrophe aphids. We welcome them in the bed of contractions, where we let them nibble away at the extra letters we want deleted. Without these tiny curved critters in our possessive noun plot, we couldn’t have a gardener’s hat, a flower’s beauty, a seed’s hull.  When they light on plural nouns, however, they cause problems.

There is one now. Apple’s for sale? Apple’s, an aphid’s presence implies, have something they can sell. True, apples possess peels, but the most capitalistic, free-market apple can’t sell its peel. Go ahead. Squish the little apostrophe aphid. Toss it in your deadhead basket and once again we have a bunch of apples at a (hopefully) good price.

As soon as the plural nouns are clear, you may see another swarm of apostrophe aphids chewing in the possessive pronoun bed. One little apostrophe can do incalculable damage to a possessive pronoun, nibbling its leaves into useless it is leaves. Once again, but not for the last time, you’ll need to pull the persistent pests who are turning your fragile little singular possessive into you’re fragile little singular possessive. Grasp the apostrophe firmly in your tweezers because you are NOT a fragile little singular possessive. YOU ARE A GRAMMAR GARDENER.

A word of caution as your stroll between the beds and among the flowers:
Our Latin roots turn up all over the place. This just shows we are a high class(ical) garden.
Many greenhorns stumble over i.e. from the Latin id est. They often assume they just stubbed a toe on e.g. (exempli gratia).
In less high-brow gardens id est goes by the name “that is” while e.g. will be written “for example.” Here is a useful tool from one word cultivator to another. (Unfortunately it uses muddied pronunciation, but we must be pragmatists and use implements that work.) Since e.g. means for example, just think of it as short for eggsample and you should be fine.

Join me next time as we visit SIMPLE SIMON’S ROWS