Hers

Click to magnify if you can't read something so teeny

I should let this pass without comment, I suppose, because its awfulness is more or less self-explanatory, but I can't. How can a professional writer be so ignorant of the general structure of the language that she does not know how to tell a plural from a possessive?

The headline is inexcusable, but might not be the writer's fault, because they don't usually write their own headlines, or at least they didn't when I was in the newspaper biz. The first sentence might also be forgiven if we were to assume that the writer was mimicking, and perhaps mocking, the advertising used by bars. But the phrase appears three times more in the article, once in quotation marks and twice not, and each time it is the same: "ladies night", no apostrophe. There is only one possible explanation, beyond the obvious and much-noted fact that Salon has no editors of any sort, or at least not any good ones, and that is that Tracy Clark-Flory just does not know the difference between ladies and ladies'.

And she gets paid to write!