After that thread.......

In yesterday's Sunday Telegraph in the gardening section you were adivised to take "proscribed" amount of something or other - I'm afraid I didn't get any further!!
Also on a webpage for a (posh) shop that was described as being on the "boarders" of somewhere.
[gnashing of teeth emoticon]

And it could sometimes be TBI - that * idiot! (But only now and then!)

And occasionally MOG: My Old Geezer.

Ha Ha Thanks

swansong Dh= darling/dear husb. OH=other half. OG=old Git.

I am having difficulty with Gransnet abbreviations
Ok so DD is Dear Daughter and DIL Daughter In Law
whats husbands ?

Exactly, Raggygranny!

The 's to indicate possession is not from 'John his land' but from the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) genitive case, which for many masculine verbs ended in s, as is still the case in German.

Granny23 One of my "wills" turned out to be a "sententia". It was in Tudor legal Latin full of abbreviations and lawyerisms, written by dipping a spider in ink and chasing it across the page, and finally very badly photocopied. It appears that someone had left a will leaving stuff to various relations, mostly to a brother and a brother's son (I knew that bit, I had previously transcribed that will, which was suitably taken to probate by the nephew)

Then, after a year, the same nephew and the rest of the legatees - plus another relation previously not mentioned - were petitioning for the money to be paid to them "as uncle had died intestate" as had his brother by now. There was clearly a story there - had they lost the original will in the upheaval of another bereavement? Had the other relation cut up rough at being excluded, so they were all playing it that there was no will in the first place?

Lastly (much as I hate text speech)" u r a pedant". Actually it should be "you're a pedant". Finis.

But then I was born in the black country, so should it have been " youm a pedant?"

I live in n Somerset so perhaps it should have been yurr a pedant!

My son gave me a cpy of Fowler for a present saying " you'r a pedant. So be one with authority"

Elegran is quite right about the line above indicating an abbreviation. I was given a voucher for a couple of modules at local University as a retirement present from DDs and chose Paeleography for one. We were working in Scots with a fair smattering of Latin and went up to the early 1700s. Not a single apostrophe only the ~~~ above the word with the missing bit, or sometimes superscript with a line below. I am not surprised that they used so many shortcuts when all lengthy documents had to be handwritten. BTW - I found the subject fascinating - it was like being a code breaker and Oh the joy when you deciphered a particularly tricky bit!

Yes, Elegran, I noticed lots of abbreviations too. It all added to the difficulty of transcription as the writing was so difficult to make out, that is until I got my eye in, so to speak. Fascinating stuff.

No apostrophes in Chaucer, but the possessive is an added 's'.
In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales he says that pilgrims come from 'every shires end'.

bigmomma I have copies of some wills from about 1600, and they are full of abbreviations. For instance, administration is written as admon with a line over the mon. I believe the apostrophe was a development of that line above an abbreviated part of a word.

That's how I was taught about the apostrophe bigmomma. John's land meant John his land, and the comma in the air shows something has been left out.

Don't know when it started. Quite early I would think.

I was looking at some 17th century wills while following up my family tree. One of the bequests referred to "John his land" presumably as at that time no-one had invented the apostrophe. Does anyone know when it did come into use?

Thanks, bagitha, I will try to use it myself.

It's agreed on here, greatnan

I type everything out in full - I had to look up AFAIK on another forum. I have now got used to my fellow posters here using DD for daughter - I am assuming it means Dear Daughter? Is this an agreed abbreviation on many sites - I have not come across it before?

My local (quite smart) chemist has a box of cuddly toys in the window with an A4 sign on it reading "Cented toys". I have been in and told them (very politely) but the sign is still there! It irritates me every time I walk past!!

On this week's Hotel Inspector the owner changed the name of his establishment to Bentleys without an apostrophe (and it did not refer to more than one posh car), which really bugged me. You would think sign writers and printers would be clued up and suggest corrections, but I see so many mistakes!

What would you have done about this? I went to the open day at my grandchildren's very good village school, but there was a poster over a display saying 'The Boar War'. The poster had obviously been made by a teacher, but even if the children had made it, should she not have corrected it? I wanted to mention it casually, but my daughter told me to keep quiet, so I did!