Monday, February 23, 2009

Get your "comment's" here!

~~ Guest Post By GoBucks! ~~

I've had it! If I could afford to do it, I would take out a full-page ad in every newspaper in America telling people to STOP using an apostrophe "s" at the end of words they mean to be plural! Please! An apostrophe "s" (in this case) indicates possession, people! This is one of the stranger phenomena I've seen in our murder of the English language. Why go to the extra trouble to ADD a punctuation mark that isn't needed? It makes no sense. It isn't like other errors we see, like substituting "their" for "there," which seems to be a common slip, even though I don't quite get that one either.... In this case, it's a matter of writing the word, thinking that it must be missing something, and adding the apostrophe just to be safe (so he/she doesn't look stupid). So now he/she has not only completely changed the meaning of the word, but it was obviously meant to be something else, and now he/she looks like an even bigger idiot! Restaurant and store signs *everywhere* are displaying this ridiculous error. Have you seen the story about the guy who travels across the country correcting typos like this on signs? I can relate! If only I could get paid for it....

2 comments:

BikerPuppy said...

I think that guy must have been in Las Vegas recently. I was at the LV airport yesterday and there was a line in security for "employee's." Someone had taken a pen and painstakingly scratched out the apostrophe. Amen!!

Amazon Barbie said...

Whoever did that is my new hero. Seriously, this is basic stuff. How hard is high school English?!!!!