My daughter having finished moving into her new digs, my weeklong career as a part-time roustabout has come to an end, and I can give my attention to that staple of American newspapering: complaints from readers.

A former colleague is irate about a headline from last week that she finds insulting to Katie Hoff, one of our hometown Olympians:

Out of gas, Hoff sinks

Admittedly not one of our happier inspirations. Ms. Hoff, who had failed to qualify in the 800-meter freestyle, acknowledged that she had attempted too much in Beijing. And yet, as our angry reader pointed out, she won a silver medal and two bronze medals, which might be disappointing but can hardly be called a failure.

The reader, though, thought that it was our duty to support the hometown athlete, not to embarrass her before friends and neighbors and family. But that’s not quite so, even given the boosterish atmosphere that suffuses newspaper sports sections. Katie Hoff misjudged her capacities, and the story was right to say so; we’re still journalists, not press agents. All the same, the tone of the headline was excessively dismissive, not reflecting the balance of the story.

Another reader demands to know by what authority The Sun uses an apostrophe without an s to make Phelps possessive. He thinks that it should be Phelps’s, the form “universally accepted as grammatically correct.”

Well, it’s a big universe. And in it the Associated Press, whose stylebook establishes house style for the bulk of American newspapers, omits the s when making a singular word ending in s possessive. Even The Chicago Manual of Style, which favors the traditional method, points out that omitting the s is an alternative system. It may not be to your taste, but it is not, strictly speaking, wrong.

(I wonder at the writers who carp and cavil about the semicolon, finding it unpleasant, artificial or even ugly, when it is the apostrophe that is the source of most of the trouble in English punctuation — inept plurals, bungled possessives, nasty little hooks in the wrong place all over the landscape.)

And yet, occasionally someone notices what we do and actually approves of it:

I want to thank either the writer, editor, or both for NOT using the redundant term "arson fire" in today's story titled, "Three arsons investigated in Harford."

It is a pleasure to see that this paper maintained high grammatical English standards!

We do make, in our own modest and anonymous way on the copy desk, what might be called Phelpsian efforts to make things right.