Grammar Girl,
I just subscribed to your podcast and love it. I have something that has irked me for a while now and was hoping to get your view on it. Perhaps I'm in the minority on this one, but shouldn't Starbucks have an apostrophe? A case study I found states that the coffee chain's name is taken from Captain Ahab's "coffee-loving first mate in Herman Melville's Moby Dick" (company background, par. 1). I do not recall, having read the novel a couple times, there being more than one first-mate named Starbuck aboard the Peaquod. Wouldn't grammatical common sense dictate that the company name should suggest possession of coffee and not plurality of coffee-drinking seamen? Incidentially, this has not deterred my Venti-a-day caffeine habit (but I have drawn an apostrophe on my cup more than once.)
Thanks,
Meredith Jones
(p.s. Should "Vent-a-day" be hypenated?)
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