About that passage you quoted in your posting:
“The DOJ-NBI point to the New People’s Army, the families and friends of the victims point to the military, the latter having the word of the survivors’ themselves to go by. Co and company, they say, did not die in an encounter, they were rubbed out.” (
There’s the Rub: “Crimes,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 24, 2011)
Yes, you’re absolutely right; in the sentence above, Mr. Conrado de Quiros’s use of the apostrophe in the noun “survivors” is wrong. That apostrophe puts “survivors’” in the plural possessive form, which is uncalled for in that sentence construction. The word doesn’t need the apostrophe for the possessive there because in the noun phrase “the word of the survivors themselves,” “survivors” is functioning as the object of the preposition “of.” As you correctly observed, the possessive aspect is already provided by the preposition “of.”
I must also point out that there are two more grammar errors in that passage you quoted.
In the clause “the DOJ-NBI point to the New People’s Army,” there’s a subject-verb disagreement error because by virtue of Mr. Quiros’s decision to combine the acronyms “DOJ” and “NBI” by hyphenating them, he made them a compound term in the singular form. The operative verb in that clause should therefore be in the singular form “points,” not in the plural-form “point,” so that clause should correctly read as follows: “The DOJ-NBI
points to the New People’s Army…”
The construction of this last sentence of that passage is also grammatically faulty: “Co and company, they say, did not die in an encounter, they were rubbed out.” This is what’s called a
fused or run-on sentence. The comma before the clause “they were rubbed out” is inadequate for punctuating the sentence, so the link between that clause and the rest of the sentence is grammatically tenuous. This grammar error is also known as a
comma splice, and in this case it makes that last clause dangle or hang dysfunctionally at the tail end of the sentence. A simple fix is, of course, to replace that comma with a semicolon: “Co and company, they say, did not die in an encounter; they were rubbed out.” This time the entire sentence is structurally correct and it reads and sounds right as well.
Even if—like you—I often find his opinions too tendentious and inflammatory for comfort, I know Mr. Quiros to be a highly competent and effective writer. I therefore suspect that those three grammatical errors in that passage from his column in the
Philippine Daily Inquirer are simply typographical or proofreading oversights. The fine English stylist that he is, I really find it hard to imagine how Mr. Quiros can make those errors in a conscious, deliberate way.
