The Five C’s
I admit I had to look up if you write “the Five C’s” with or without apostrophe. Apparently, with apostrophe. At least, that’s how everybody else writes it on the internet, and if it’s on the internet, it must be true. Although, in my opinion, it doesn’t make any sense. I always thought that, in English, you use the apostrophe in cases where it’s an abbreviated form of “is”, like “it’s” or “that’s”, or in the possessive, such as “Julio’s wrench”. Reading “the five C’s” makes my brain go “the five C’s … WHAT?” Anyway, I opted for the version with the apostrophe anyway, and I’m sure nobody would have noticed, if I hadn’t brought up the subject here. Especially in the comic font, where it’s all capital letters, it would have looked like “CS” otherwise and been less understandable. Maybe that’s the reason why the apostrophe is in such wide use in this case in the first place.
But you see how much thought goes into some small aspects of our strips. That’s not to say that we don’t miss many other aspects and make mistakes all the time. In fact, I distinctly remember one of the very first feedbacks we got on our comic strips, when we put them out on the interwebs many years ago. We had misspelled “satellite” with two t, and the message was something like “use a spell checker, morons”. A first glimpse of many kind comments yet to come, haha!
That’s one of those situations where reading text on the Internet from supposed English native speakers doesn’t help much. I personally have to make an effort not to get sidetracked by such a widespread apostrophe confusion. I mean, its despicable that a native speaker cannot put the apostrophe in it’s correct place. Oh damn, it happened again…
There are five? I learned “Climb, Confess, Consult, Comply”.
Chute is better than Crash, though!
Conserve. The last C is conserve. If you don’t know where you are going there is no need to go there fast.
I am so glad I am not the only one pointing out the often wrongly used apostrophy. In German the apostrophy is much less used than in English. Even so, when it is used it is used according to English rules and wrongly at that.
I am glad I am not alone!
Seems like if enough folks break the rules of grammar, the rules eventually comply.
So I thought I would look up “the 5 C’s of flying” nd the first link is to a CFI Notebook page. Don’t know how other americans or Europeans count, but I thought 5 came after 4 and before 6? 😉
https://www.cfinotebook.net/notebook/flight-hazards-and-safety/lost-aircraft-procedures#:~:text=Five%20C%27s%3A%20Circle%3A%20If%20able%2C%20you%20want%20to,changing%20and%20not%20get%20any%20further%20off%20track“