Re: Common Errors in English

["Michael West" <mbwest -at- bigpond -dot- com>]

Mark Baker wrote:
> Michael West wrote:
>
>> "Years" and "weeks" can be treated as possessives
>> or as adjectival nouns, but if you're writing a resume,
>> be aware that many, if not most, educated readers
>> will consider "Nine years experience" to be a minor
>> grammatical blunder. Maybe you can justify it on
>> theoretical grounds, but you may never get the chance.
>
> That will depend on how you define "educated reader". Certainly your
> average university graduate is not going to know the difference. The
> idea of the "educated reader" really came about as a deliberate piece
> of elitism.

All of that may have some basis in history, but it is not
relevant to practical questions of usage. We have dictionaries
and style guides to help us resolve mundane usage issues without
requiring esoteric investigations into social history and Latin
grammar.

I did the Google search you mention, and a close examination
of the results reveals that statistically, the "ten years experience"
version is found in company with generally weak writing and
errors in spelling and grammar. Moreover, the possessive usage (ten
years' experience) is almost invariably the one recommended by style
gurus and the one used in professional publishing.

In English, literate people don't write  "two mens hats" or "one
womans dress," nor do they consider them correct. Likewise,
"ten years' experience" is understood by most of them -- without
any reference to Latin grammar --  to be a possessive form.
Similarly, constuctions like "early years experience" or "first-year
courses" are recognized as the adjectival form, which does not
require the apostrophe.
-- 
Michael West