Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we're saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I'm Lauren Smyth, and I spotted a major grammar error in a well-known piece of software. The sentence is "respond to others' events" and the grammar error was that the apostrophe in "others" came before the S.

This is wrong because "others" is plural. You're not responding to the event of one other; you're responding to the event of any number of hypothetical others. As with "World Pilots' Day," which we discussed in the last episode, a plural noun that ends in s has the apostrophe added after the s to make it possessive.

Do not get confused. As a small reminder, apostrophes do not make words plural. Ever. That's probably what the writer of this ungrammatical sentence was thinking putting the apostrophe in the wrong place. How that phrase made it into the final product, which is a quite expensive software suite--and mind you, this error appears on the default home screen--well, that's beyond me. But hey, maybe they'll hear this episode and hire me to be their editor.

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