Which one is correct?
1: Well, you canceled on Tuesday and our policy is 24 hours' notice for all cancellations.
2: Well, you canceled on Tuesday and our policy is 24 hours notice for all cancellations.
To me personally, the first one makes more sense grammatically. But I've also heard that the second version is how they typically write it on paper forms at hospitals (that's what native speakers say). Could you please clarify my confusion?
Answer
You are correct. "24 hours' notice" is possessive for the same reason as "a day's drive," "a moment's thought," or "in five minutes' time." I assume the apostrophe is dropped due to simple ignorance.
Expressions involving time with no apostrophe are in use, too, but they take forms like "two-hour meeting," where the hyphen makes a compound adjective. If your example fit that pattern, it would be "24-hour notice," but that would imply a notice that lasted 24 hours, a nonsensical concept. The possessive pattern is a much better fit.
No comments:
Post a Comment