Apostrophes

Marina and I were exchanging instant messages today while she was at the reference desk, and I was trying to help her help a patron who was requesting some unusual information. During the conversation, she was explaining something in the text and included a portion in parentheses, but she never ended it with the last parenthesis. She immediately apologized, which I thought was funny. There are some people who are far too conscientious about their typos, but I thought I’d give her a hard time anyway, telling her that parenthetical conversations that go on forever wear me out. So she gave me my “)” so I could relax.

This led to a series of complaints that far too often, people will use abbreviations, contractions or acronyms with things that deserve to be spelled out, but they will stick apostrophes in words where they are not needed. There seems to be a new version of the word your, which is either spelled UR, or you’re, for random reasons. HATE THIS! But the worst offender is the apostrophe-S. Plurals have apostrophes now. No, they’re not supposed to, but I’m finding no one even tries to be correct, and whenever there is an S on the end of a word, they just put an apostrophe before it.

There is a subdivision near my house, and they commissioned a huge stone with the name of the subdivision carved into it, which might have looked classy if it wasn’t proofread by a fucking moron. The finished boulder had read “Northern Pine’s of Illinois”. Duh. Carved, I should say again. It stayed that way for many months, and then someone recently came in and patched the apostrophe over with some similarly shaded putty. However, the big boulder now reads, “Northern Pine s of Illinois.” Lovely. It seems to me that this kind of crap didn’t happen so often before the proclivity of instant messages and texting, which makes me think that the world is forgetting how to use the language properly, even though they’re using written words more.

Being a gigantic bitch, I’ve decided to make fun of the idiots who know not where to put apostrophes, even though that’s elementary school subject matter. I’ve decided that every time there is an S in a word, it will automatically get an apostrophe first.

That’s a lot of ‘S’s, people.

What end’s up happening here i’s that word’s look foreign. It’s almo’st pretty. ‘So, I’m going to go with thi’s. At lea’st for the time being. Becau’se making fun of apo’strophe’s i’s almo’st a’s much fun a’s making fun of the people who have no idea what to do with them. It’s ‘shocking to me becau’se it’s not that difficult. And if we u’sed them correctly, we’d hardly u’se them at all. Particularly when you compare with u’sing them before each ‘S, which i’s getting a bit ridiculou’s. It make’s more ‘sen’se to ju’st not u’se them at all.

Thi’s make’s me wonder if apo’strophe-abu’ser’s would even notice.

And how ironic if they were to ‘speak up and point out the mi’su’se of the apo’strophe’s.

Then again, I think I might ju’st be ‘shooting my’self in the foot, wearing out my apo’strophe key on a point that can’t be under’stood by tho’se who need to under’stand it mo’st.