Whatever happened to the apostrophe?
Charlotte:
January 2nd, 2007
As I drove round the M25 the other morning, the main source of irritation for me was not the fog or the Polish lorry which pulled out in front of me with no warning but a car bearing a sticker saying “Honk if your horny”. It was not the sentiment that got to me although that was bad enough. It was the missing apostrophe! Why oh why are people incapable of using it properly? Every day we see signs outside greengrocers advertising “tomatoe’s” and menus in pubs advertising roast “potatoe’s”. Even A level English students were apparently guilty of getting “its” and “it’s” muddled in exam scripts and it is probably fair to assume that it wasn’t just the pressure of the exam to blame. I know from a friend who is a Junior school teacher that it is still taught in school so where does it all go wrong? I can just about forgive shops that say “less than” instead of “fewer than” and even my English tutor at Uni agrees that only dinosaurs get upset about split infinitives but please please please think about the poor old apostrophe and don’t make me crash my car on the motorway!