I’m a big believer in buying products made in the U.S.A., whether it’s a desk chair from Michigan, a lawn chair from Georgia, or a baseball bat from Louisiana.
American manufacturing is resurgent after decades of decline, as evidenced by cover stories such as this one. But there’s still a long way to go to recoup the millions of jobs lost during the Great Recession and the products farmed out to factories overseas.
Heck, do we even make hyphens in America any longer?
You wouldn’t think so from the name of a new documentary about U.S. manufacturing. I first heard about it when filmmakers Vincent Vittorio and Nathaniel McGill appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
One of them must feel left out, however, given the movie’s title: “American Made Movie,” as in, “An American made a movie about manufacturing.”
The problem is the absence of a hyphen, rendering “American” a noun when it should be a compound adjective: American-Made Movie.
Hyphens (and when to use them) give a lot of us pause. I-tend-to-over-hyphenate. Well, maybe not to that extent, but there are times when I probably overdo it. I’m a work-in-progress American.
Pro’s and cons of apostrophes
You know what really gives people fits? The apostrophe. I see examples all the time of an apostrophe being used to create the plural firm of a word. To wit:
Maybe the business really is named Calzone’s and besides Philly cheese steaks, wraps and wings, its menu features delicious American pie. More likely someone brain-cramped and misplaced an apostrophe, just as they did on this van:
If Air Pro’s takes an apostrophe, then why not also Sale’s, Installation’s and Senior Discount’s?
An apostrophe is used to show possession or to indicate a contraction in which it goes where the missing letter(s) would be:
You’re.
Don’t.
It’s.
That is, “it’s” if you mean “it is.”
The Tiger Hotel in Columbia, Mo., near the University of Missouri campus, used “it’s” when it meant the possessive pronoun “its” on the reservation page of its website.
I pointed this out in an email to the hotel:
The second line reads “it’s fabulous shops and restaurants” when obviously it should say “its fabulous shops and restaurants.” While we’re at it, there’s no need to capitalize “Columbia Campus” as that is not a proper name, and “medical centres” should be “medical centers,” the latter being the preferred spelling in American English.
Ah, spelling and grammar.
Another U.S. sector in need of a comeback.
