I saw this in a press release today.
Problem:
A possessive apostrophe is missing.
Explanation:
The press release was about AT&T U-verse service in Nashville, Tennessee.
The full sentence was “AT&T has begun pulling permits in Nashville to roll out its new TV service, the areas first formidable competition for Comcast cable and the satellite TV companies that operate here.”
A possessive apostrophe is missing in the word “area”.
I believe that the number of people who write possessive nouns simply by adding the letter “s” is increasing.
I believe that this increasingly common mistake is due to ignorance and to the growing number of people who use text messaging, for which punctuation beyond a comma, period, exclamation mark, or question mark is often difficult.
And I believe that this mistake is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to omit the possessive apostrophe than to include it.
Solution:
“… the area’s first formidable competition …”