I know it’s been done to death, but Lord have mercy! First on one of the Law & Orders, they actually take the time to make a fake banner put up by a do-gooder character:
So-and-so Childrens’ Charity
Now I get an e-mail from Verizon which is presumably sent out to anyone who orders a shipment:
If you’d like to track the progress of your shipment via FedEx, you’ll find its’ current status at
It’s like they decide an apostrophe must go somewhere, and they just slap it on.
Thank goodness for the Apostrophe Protection Society.
And if you ever wondered about the apostrophe in Lands’ End:
This says it’s a grammar quiz, but most of it is really an apostrophe quiz. (Only thing that drives me nuts about this site is that it doesn’t display an answer key, so you can’t tell what you got wrong. Didn’t have that problem with this quiz, but there were a couple of others where I apparently missed one or two answers…)
Walgreens dropped the apostrophe entirely.
Macy*s turned it into a star.
And inside many of their stores they have a Mens department.
But I actually think the world would be a better place if English simply eliminated the apostrophe entirely. It is, of course not used in speech. And yet we all know when we hear it whether the word is “it’s” or “its”. Therefore the apostrophe is an anachronism, like capitalizing the days of the week, and similar useless conventions.
I have reported here before about the worst use of an apostrophe that I have ever seen in the wild. Charles, one of my co-workers, was ill with the flu and had to miss work. His supervisor sent out an email to inform us of this. The email read:
I am going to have to tell Spoons about this. For years, ever since we worked together as writers, we have had a collection of grammatical superheroes: Conan the Grammarian, his sidekick Punctuation Boy, and their ally Scansion Girl.
I believe I have just discovered their arch-enemy.
“Quick, Punctuation Boy! To the Grammarmobile!”
“What is it now, Conan?”
“Someone is threatening the stability of the city’s punctuation supply! Serial commas have broken loose, apostrophes are mutating, and the hospitals are reporting a rash of irregular periods.”
“You don’t mean…”
“Yes. It’s The Punctuanarchist.”
I forgot my other favorite, when someone pays for a lovely hand-painted sign outside their home: The Smith’s Apparently only one of the family members can claim ownership.
And yet, when we write down what we hear in our heads, it often comes out wrong.
Years ago in Des Moines I used to pass by THE JOHN ROBERT’S STUDIO.
I never did find out whether his name was John Roberts, John Robert, or possibly The John Robert.
Of course, if we do have a comic, it’s important that our heroes never get dates with Noun girls. But the Verb girls will always be happy to date our heroes.
