Columnist Barry Saunders finds fault with the word ginormous and wishes editors would not allow such coinages into the pages of dictionaries. John McIntyre, who writes You Don't Say at baltimoresun.com, explains that lexicographers are not legislators. They describe what is going on with language; they do not put a stamp of approval on coinages merely by adding them to the dictionary.

Of course, I don't recommend using "ginormous" in a news story or in an academic paper. The New Oxford American Dictionary's entry for "ginormous" notes that it is "informal, humorous." That's guidance that writers can heed. And if you are on a job interview, it might be best to describe your capacity for hard work with a more formal word -- enormous or boundless, perhaps.

Today's quiz is about word choice. Choose the better word in these five sentences. You might find a couple of sentences tricky. I hope you find the quiz enjoyable and educational. After all, that's the point.

Click here or on the question mark icon to begin. 

Two advertisements caught our eyes this week. They have apostrophe problems, but different ones. The first, pictured below, falls into the old trap of using an apostrophe to make a plural. The shopping center mentioned in this ad, which came as a direct mail flier, is Clayton Corners (multiple corners).

The second ad appeared on television. It has a more unusual apostrophe problem, as you can see below. We use apostrophes to make nouns possessive, a vestige of a time when English was a more inflected language, when words changed form to indicate their function in a sentence. Pronouns still change form when they are used in the possessive case, but nouns merely take 's or ' . I wonder if the ad writers feared the apostrophe. Or maybe the apostrophe was just omitted inadvertently.

At the risk of sounding like a schoolmarm, I am going to repeat something that we learned early in elementary school.

Here are the simplified rules for making a common noun possessive.

• For singular nouns, add 's. man's friend, girl's dress.
• For plural nouns ending in s, add ' (apostrophe only). boys' game, dogs' leashes.
• For plural nouns not ending in s, add 's. men's friend, children's games.

There are, of course, variations on the rules, but these rules will carry us through most cases.

Update: A commenter questioned whether the shopping center mentioned in the first ad was indeed Clayton Corners. It is. Below is a photo of the shopping center's sign.

This word usage quiz has a twist.

A contributor provides some images of bad signage.

A reader contributes an example of pronoun misuse.