I think Marc Fryd is incorrect to think that lavatory signs "Gents" and
"Ladies" represent apostrophe loss. When the sign on a male lavatory
is written out in full, traditionally it appeared as "Gentlemen", which
surely makes it clear that "Gents" and "Ladies" are intended as simple
plurals, describing the people entitled to enter, not as possessives.
Likewise a sign "Hairdressers" on a shopfront is surely a description of
the business; away from the shop, one might talk about a "hairdresser's"
meaning a "hairdresser's shop", but a label on the shop can assume it's
a shop and would normally identify its contents. (A butcher's shop
would traditionally be labelled "Butcher" or -- for some reason I have
never understood -- "Family Butcher", not "Butcher's".)
I would add that I also disagree with whoever commented that you don't find
possessive apostrophes dropped in continuous prose, at least with respect
to present-day British writing. In our students' writing, I think we do
find both possessive apostrophes which ought to be there dropped, and
apostrophes inserted in simple plurals where they are redundant, though
the second is commoner.
G.R. Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB
e-mail geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
fax +44 1273 671320
web http://www.grsampson.net
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