This is very illuminating. What sparked the poll was not the its / it’s thread, but reading through GQ and seeing several examples, including “todays society” or similar. Since “today” can’t be pluralized, “todays” can never be confusing, but it still made me want to bust out the red pen.
I’ve been in an ongoing war with Sallie Mae, the student loan people, who ask as a security question “what is your grandmothers maiden name?” I think that someone in the business of education ought to understand the apostrophe, as well as the utility of differentiating between maternal and paternal grandmothers.
You may think we have infinite tomorrows, but I like to think we’ll never run out of todays.
But, back to the OP. I think people should know how to use the apostrophe. I admit to a chuckle or two when an opposing attorney gets it wrong in a brief. I don’t agree that it indicates anything about the writer’s intelligence. Just his or her carelessness. I would imagine 95% of those who get it wrong know how to do it right.
I am one of the ones who gets driven batshit, though most of the time I don’t say anything. I talk to a lot of my family in India and they just sprinkle apostrophes willy-nilly everywhere - or refuse to use them at all. Yes, I know English is a second language (though they learn it in school, right alongside of Hindi) and so I never, ever say anything or correct them or even remotely refer to it. Instead, I come here to bitch.
I am all for casualness in ordinary conversation but I have to admit egregious mistakes do get under my skin. This is the kind of shit that bothers me:
AAAAAAAAAAARGH! But I do make allowances for different people. What drives me more batty than anything, really, is when people say I shouldn’t care in my own writing! I let you go crazy with your grammar and spelling, please don’t mind me when I say I DO care.
Yes, misused apostrophes really bug me. On the other hand, why do we use an apostrophe with a possessive? Both German and Danish (and presumably other Germanic languages) use an “s” genitive with no apostrophe. And, to confuse the issue, the possessive “its” does not use it, which may be the source of the problem.
There is one problem I have. We can talk about the number of SUVs on the road, no problem. But suppose that we use lower case. Now “number of suvs” is not clear at all. Compare, “My first computer operated at about one mips”. Looks like a plural, but isn’t. (It’s millions of instructions per second and invariable in number.) So I want to write suv’s, just for clarity.
I have a confession. I spent about a month on this computer (my backup, since my main is in the shop) never using an apostrophe in my email. I’m so, so sorry. I hated every second of it.
(It was because of a known Firefox issue where it was stuck as the quickkey for “find” in certain typing fields, and it would kick me out of my message every time I forgot and hit that key. Google gave me several solutions, but the only one that finally (finally!) worked for me was installing an add-on.)
