Author: Kirk

An apostrophe to the rescue!

Apostrophes, Possessives

A few years ago I noticed something odd about the television ads, billboards, and signs for the Church’s Chicken restaurant chain.

The logo read “Churchs Chicken” without the required possessive apostrophe between the name “Church” and the letter “s”.

Here is an example of the apostrophe-less logo used by Church’s Chicken up until just a few years ago:

The absence of the apostrophe bugged me but also made me wonder whether the company was omitting the apostrophe for some sort of branding or legal reason.

For example, many trademark experts recommend against using possessives in brand names — and definitely against using a brand name (such as “Kodak”) as a possessive noun (such as “Kodak’s”).

Well the folks at Church’s Chicken apparently realized that the apostrophe-less logo was actually a mistake.

For example, here is an older logo that I found for Church’s Chicken:

As you can see, the older logo did have the apostrophe.

And here is how the Church’s Chicken logo appears at this writing — again with the possessive apostrophe:

So the restaurant chain had the possessive apostrophe, dropped it (for who knows why), and re-added it.

Thank you, Church’s Chicken, for saving the apostrophe!

Proof that Twitter has become more commercial

General

I could have used “How to get people to stop following you on Twitter” as the title of this blog post.

Yesterday I got eight email messages from UseQwitter.com that various followers of me on Twitter had quit following me.

And get this: All eight quit for the same reason!

“What was the reason?,” you might ask.

I wrote four days ago my first only-personal tweet on Twitter.

All that I wrote was something to the effect of: “Go figure. Weather in Houston is spectacular, but I am sick.”

By the way: Do not look for this tweet now; I deleted it after realizing the error of my ways!

I was imitating someone whom I follow in Austin, who had tweeted something about Austin weather that same day.

But his tweet was not as personal as mine; he simply celebrated the beautiful weather that day.

What those eight Twitter followers of me did — that is, quit following me — actually matches my own behavior about a month ago, when I stopped following a woman who was tweeting like crazy and mostly about personal stuff such as boarding an airplane, going to dinner with someone, and looking for a nightclub to go dancing.

After she started to follow me, I started to follow her because she seemed to have some interesting ideas related to Internet marketing.

But the dominance of her personal tweets over her business tweets made me stop following her.

This is my personal proof that Twitter has become more commercial than personal: I will stop following others when they tweet too much about personal matters, and others stopped following me when I tweeted about one personal matter after my seventy tweets about various business matters.

So my advice to anyone is to take care with the subject matter of one’s tweets.