Le pin's

[Paris]

Could anyone remind me why the French spell this little word as "Le pin's"?    About a year ago I read an explanation which seemed perfectly logical at the time.  I thought I was bound to remember, but now all I can recall is that the apostrophe is not an apostrophe!  Possibly it indicated a foreign word?  Not to be confused with le pin or les pins?  All I could tell our elderly French teacher whothought there was a misprint in a text was that the word le pin's was correct French!

Julia

[Rob G]

I don't know why the French do this, but they seem to have the habit of

using apostrophe s ('s) for the plural form of certain word/names

borrowed from English. There's a shop near where we live called

"Interior's".

Rob

[Tourangelle]

Very irritating isn't it.  Especially if you are trying to teach it.  Our boulangerie sells cookie's.

[Polycarpe]

Maybe they're borrowing directly from what they see in the UK. A greengrocer near where I lived in east London advertised "Apple's", "Banana's" and, most worryingly, "Lick's" (poirreaux). His other plurals were fine. Strange.

It niggles when I see such mistakes here. I'm outraged when I see the same in English speaking countries (country's?)

[Dick Smith]

I did a bit of research and I found this:

Pin's : 1989. Mot formé à partir de pin, épingle, et avec une apostrophe faussement anglaise afin de maintenir

la prononciation de la consonne. La proposition a été épinglette. (Yeah, right...)

at

http://monsu.desiderio.free.fr/curiosites/faux-ang.html

which is quite an interesting page.

[Paris]

Thank you Dick - that's it.  I knew there was more to that use of the apostrophe than the word being English!

Reply delayed as rather busy this month with wedding anniversary (mine) and family weddings...

Julia

[Weedon]

Whatever you do, don't make the same mistake as I did and put an E on the end of Pin to show somebody how the name of a conifer tree changes from French to English![:$]

weedon