Last month it was easier to spot a misplaced apostrophe than a snowflake in my town. Two signs in particular irked me.
I know that the teachers don’t put up the sign outside the school, but I hoped that at least one of them would point out the error in “Thank you veteran’s!!” I waited all month for the school to fix the sign, but it never did. The sign stood for weeks as a painful smear on the school’s reputation and a poor example for the students.
The other sign wasn’t something handwritten in a mom-and-pop store but a preprinted sign in a regional grocery store chain. I wonder how many people missed that mistake before it was printed and delivered to about 100 stores.
It baffles me when people make the mistake of trying to form a plural with an apostrophe. Some possessive uses of an apostrophe can be confusing, but rarely is an apostrophe used to form a plural. For example, you might need it for clarity if you’re talking about minding your p’s and q’s.
So before you stick an apostrophe in a word willy-nilly, ask yourself whether it is forming a possessive or substituting for omitted letters or figures.
Which punctuation mistake most bothers you?
My high school in Illinois had a speed bump just inside the fence around the teachers’ parking lot, so a sign was hung on the fence: “Drive Slow”. The English teachers asked for years that the sign be corrected, to no avail.
As I read your comment, I was hoping that in the end one of the teachers would take the initiative to paint the correction on the sign.
So here’s the thing: you can omit letters and make it LOOK like a possessive. To wit: “potato’s”.
“Potatoes,” is, of course, the correct plural, but the apostrophe unambiguously replaces the ‘e’ when grocers are advertising a sale, as in, “Four potato’s for $1.” So just how incorrect IS the grocers’ apostrophe, anyway? How often is something going to belong to a potato?
The grocers’ apostrophe still rankles, t’be sure, but I’m forced to let it slide on a technicality…even if they didn’t mean it that way.
I had never heard the term “grocers’ apostrophe.” Thank you for the explanation.
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