Apostrophes and Frederick's

[lloyd_5]

Just skimming through today's new stories, I bumped into a reference to 'Frederick's of Hollywood'. I know most surnames are 'Fredericks' and first names are 'Frederick' so surely this is a mistake as it doesn't have a possessive - like Victoria's Secret. I know this is entombed in copyright and trademark law but can someone, amongst you gurus, justify the apostrophe usage.

 

[PennLady]

I don't know if I could justify it, but I've always read it, I think, as with a sort of missing but understood word. I.e., "Frederick's [store] of Hollywood." The store belongs to Frederick, hence the apostrophe.

I also think that with a store name, they can call it whatever they want and punctuate it as they want.

According to wiki, it was started by a man name Frederick Mellinger. So when he opened a store, it was "Frederick's."

 

[sr71plt]

A business has the right to spell (or misspell) and register its name as it pleases. So this isn't really a "proper grammar" question. But it's a good question for a writer to consider. The authoritative place to look would be the Trademark list (which can be found at the INTA Web site). Frederick's isn't on there. The easier, more practical research to do, though, is to google it and look for the authoritative Web site. In this case Fredrick's of Hollywood has its own Web site, and how it spells the name is the way it should be spelled for that business. http://www.fredericks.com/ (Look at the Web site heading, not the URL. Apostrophes aren't used in URLs.)

 

[Tio_Narratore]

A business has the right to spell (or misspell) and register its name as it pleases. So this isn't really a "proper grammar" question. But it's a good question for a writer to consider. The authoritative place to look would be the Trademark list (which can be found at the INTA Web site). Frederick's isn't on there. The easier, more practical research to do, though, is to google it and look for the authoritative Web site. In this case Fredrick's of Hollywood has its own Web site, and how it spells the name is the way it should be spelled for that business. http://www.fredericks.com/ (Look at the Web site heading, not the URL. Apostrophes aren't used in URLs.)

Depends on where you are, Pilot. In Quebec, the Language Cops made stores remove the apostrophe since it wasn't French. They've recently tried to get international companies to adopt "French" names here ("Marché Wal-Mart," for example), but the businesses took them to court and won. They can keep the same names hey use elsewhere in the world.

 

[sr71plt]

If you're writing under censorship, you'd do what the censor said, of course. That's a rare occurrence. For writing, 99.99 percent of the time, you'd track down how the original source spells it, and you'd be good to go.