Months worth
Posted: May 17th, 2017, 5:33 pm
I am having an argument with myself and also with Word grammar check about the correct use of the apostrophe in these two sentences:
We have six months' stock.
We have six months worth of stock.
The first one is possessive and therefore must have an apostrophe but the second, although it looks substantially the same sentence, I would argue is a simple plural. My argument would be that the apostrophe in the first is to clearly identify 'months' as referring to stock (the next word) and could represent a missing 'of', whereas in the second, the fact that 'stock' is not the next word and the 'worth of' denotes the relationship to stock means that it is a simple plural.
What do you think?
We have six months' stock.
We have six months worth of stock.
The first one is possessive and therefore must have an apostrophe but the second, although it looks substantially the same sentence, I would argue is a simple plural. My argument would be that the apostrophe in the first is to clearly identify 'months' as referring to stock (the next word) and could represent a missing 'of', whereas in the second, the fact that 'stock' is not the next word and the 'worth of' denotes the relationship to stock means that it is a simple plural.
What do you think?