Advent Calendar Day Four

Greeting's.

The world of advent calendar hatred shouldn't be limited to people or, indeed, comic strip's... *

Day Four

Extraneou's (or missing) apostrophe's

I cant believe in thi's day and age that this nefariou's practice still occur's. Its not just limited to grocers shop's any more. Ive seen instance's in newspaper's and even the BBC New's website of late. If you havent guessed, I'm talking about the misuse of the possessive apostrophe and the apostrophe in general. It drive's me insane.

Urgh. I have to stop the deliberate misuse there. After typing the paragraph above, I don't think I've seen so many words underlined in red. As bad as seeing such abuse of it on what should be one of the world's most respected news sites, it's upsetting seeing it in my children's school on a display for the eco committee as soon as you walk through the door. Sometimes, I get inadvertently drawn into it myself; I use my iPhone for tweeting and going on Feckbook, and Autocorrect kicks in; for example, if you're not paying attention, "TV is at its worst today" will get magically transformed into "TV is at it's worst today", and you end up posting it and looking like a twat. Thanks, Apple.

I realise there are much bigger, much worse things to get irritated or angered by in the world, but as a lover of the English language, those extraneous apostrophes are like miniature daggers being stabbed into my eyes. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but "name's" will never hurt me". Bollocks.

Futurama covered it nicely in a recent episode, Möbius Dick (nicked from someone's Tumblr page, thank you, whoever you are):

Leela: “Hang on. ‘Its’ shouldn’t have an apostrophe. This means, ‘And it is crew’. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Alien: “It’s a minor error, lady. I mean, we’re space aliens! It’s a miracle we can even speak English.”

Leela: “The miracle is that I’m not kicking your ass.”

Nicely put. More tomorrow!

* Adding those apostrophes actually made my skin crawl.