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This sounds very Midwestern to me. Where I come from that would happen a lot. It wasn't necessarily that people didn't know the real name of the place. It funct
by bunderbunder 2y ago
This sounds very Midwestern to me. Where I come from that would happen a lot. It wasn't necessarily that people didn't know the real name of the place. It functioned more like an inflection that helps to distinguish between the company, and a specific storefront operated by that company. Compare it to the distinction between "Alice" and "Alice's". Alice is the person, and Alice's is her house.
For example, you you'd say "JCPenney stock is up by 32 cents this week," but you'd also say, "I bought this shirt at Penney's."
- saghm 2y agoMy family is all from either New England or New York, so it might not just be a Midwestern thing anymore!
- vidanay 2y agoI've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries at "Jewels"
- kbrkbr 2y agoThat in turn sounds a lot like the latin locative case [1], which was a case next to dative, accusative etc. to indicate place. [1] https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program/Grammar/Cases/latin-case https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program...
- foldr 2y agoIs this not restricted to company names deriving from personal names (or words that are perceived as such), though? For example, would you say “I bought this shirt at Target’s”?
- bunderbunder 2y agoIn general, yeah, but this is sneaking into the area of language where it's all ad-hoc conventions and there aren't actually any reliable rules. I suspect, for example, that there's a sandhi component that helps predict which store names do and do not get the S added.
- olyjohn 2y agoPeople call Safeway "Safeway's" all the time. This one kinda drives me crazy. Fred Meyer is also not "Fred Meyer's" but at least I can see why that would happen. Then you have Vons, which used to be "Von's Grocery Company." I guess you go in there now and there's just more than one guy named Von in the store. Ralphs also dropped the apostrophe. Albertson's is now "Albertsons." Kinda funny it seems like Americans are dropping the apostrophes. The exact opposite of what the article is talking about. At least nobody is saying "Let's go to Costco's." Also in the PNW, everybody called it "Penny's" for as long as I can remember.
- lukas099 2y agoI’m definitely saying “Costco’s” from now on; that’s hilarious to me.
- sheepybloke 2y agoI come from Michigan, and have found that the two fastest ways people identify me are 1) calling fizzy soft drinks "pop" and 2) that I add an "s", e.g. King Sooper's or Meijer's.