Rick Santorum's greatest fear: When possessive and plural apostrophes collide

This is Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum is a republican politician who is deeply concerned for his country.

You see, Rick is worried about the gays. He is at pains for other people to see that if we let gays marry, everything will go totally shit.

For example, just think about this: what if two gay people marry (each other), OK fine, but then what if they become some sort of power couple who have a number of valuable assets? Assets, if you're following me, that HETEROSEXUAL people could have owned! What if they buy a holiday house, then a gay couple will have not one, but two houses. Those are TWO houses that one hetero couple could have owned. Nuff said!

So in this case, if you wanted to talk about the two houses of a gay couple, would you say 'Jane and Mary's Houses, or would you say Jane's and Mary's Houses?'

It's complicated, because it's like this: there's only one of Mary and Jane, but they have more than one house (until Rick Santorum becomes president, then they will just live in a mental institution for wayward girls).

When it comes to using pronouns, the rule is that the one that would stand in isolation is the correct one, and while this situation doesn't deal with pronouns, you should follow this rule when you are forced to say something awkward, and as Rick Santorum is at pains to emphasise, like Jane's and Mary's Houses.

What is the difference between i.e. and e.g.?

The term i.e. tends to come up a lot in writing, but what does it actually mean? And why is it different from e.g?

I.e. is an abbreviation for the Latin term 'id est', which means 'that is' or 'in other words'. So you use i.e. when you want to clarify things a little bit further. For example:

The key issue at hand, i.e. who will rid of all this raw sewerage, really needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

Things got a lot worse after that, i.e everybody died.

E.g. on the other hand, is short for 'exampli gratia', which means 'for example'. As you can see, e.g. wouldn't work in the two examples we looked at above, because the i.e.'s in question are not examples of something, they are the key clarifying aspect of the sentence.

So if you want to say something like 'a number of vegetables, for example, carrots, celery, snow peas and beets, appear to have come to life', you could also say 'a number of vegetables, e.g. carrots, celery, snow peas and beets, appear to have come to life.'

or, A lot of the things that people need, e.g. clean water, shelter, and food, are inaccessible since the floods.

And what is the deal with the full stops that come out of nowhere?  Yes, as you might have noticed both i.e. and e.g. have awkward full stops after them. But the truth is, those full stops are there because both i.e. and e.g. are abbreviations.

While we think about these differences, let's look at this picture of an actor playing Mark Antony, a famous Latin speaker, pictured here trying to decide who he's going to kill next.

Mmmm. Well, there are a number of people who might just stand in the way of me gaining absolute power, and there are a number of ways I could kill them, e.g. push them over a cliff, poison them, or even send an army to snuff them out.