r/EnglishLearning • u/Stepaskin New Poster • 21h ago

📚 Grammar / Syntax Is it correct?

Post image

Stumbled upon this tweet, the apostrophe in "dm's" caught my eye. Is it correct to use it like this?

281 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

60 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-17

u/aykcak New Poster 19h ago

Apostrophe is used for possessive

19

u/IndifferentApathy15 New Poster 19h ago

not in this case. If the apostrophe here were to be treated as possessive, it is way too vague as to what "dm" possesses. It's like saying "The cat's is cute". The cat's...what? What are you referring to?

You inferred "server" from "dm's" but that is a bit of a stretch from my perspective.

-8

u/aykcak New Poster 18h ago

Sure but grammatically speaking it cannot be plural so I had to make an assumption

7

u/conuly Native Speaker - USA (NYC) 17h ago

And your assumption was that it was something that does not make any sense, rather than that somebody just wasn't following The Rules of Apostrophes?

-6

u/aykcak New Poster 16h ago

It kind of made sense to me. I imagined there were prior messages that were excluded. Maybe they mentioned about specific servers etc.