Sportsmen's? Really?

Spent some time with Winding Waters at the Portland Sportsmen’s Show. I’ve gone to this with my pappy quite a bit over the years, and we’ve always called it the Outdoor Show. Everybody I know calls it the Outdoor Show. Probably because “Sportsmen’s” sounds stupid.

I didn’t consult Strunk & White on this, because I quit checking with those guys years ago. I punctuate, conjugate and hyphenate however I damn well please and it’s a system that works really well for me.

But it bothers me when other people throw apostrophes around haphazard. Even if they're technically correct, if it looks clunky, there's other words out there. And they're free. Take them for a test drive.

Sportsmen’s looks double-plural to me. It’s not, and I see it’s suggesting this show belongs to the sportsmens, but have you ever in your life deployed the term ‘sportsmen’ when talking? You have not, unless you’re the coordinator of a large trade show catering to outdoorsmen, which is also a word not often used, but slightly better than sportsmen’s.

So the sportsmens cruised around the Expo Center, investigating the many outdoorsmens activities while businessmens sold trips and equipments to their customers’s and I met some nice folks’s and we talked about rafting trips’s and, all in all, I had some good experiences’s.

If this insight into sportsmens and outdoorsmens hasn't satisfied your burning curiosity about trade shows, my Chieftain column this week and the Gearboat Chronicles are what you're looking for.