Last month, my parents and I attended a local St. Patrick's Day event. There were many whiteboard signs set up outside the food trucks displaying the vendors' offerings. A few beers in, my mom stepped away for a moment, then returned to my side and said "I erased all the apostrophes off that sign!" I turned and saw that the heretofore eye twitch-inducing punctuations were indeed eliminated from the menu board to read "Tacos" and "Quesadillas" instead of "Taco's" and "Quesadilla's." I grinned and high-fived her, saying that she was my hero.
As a degree-holding individual, I am eternally swimming in a sea of horrible grammar and punctuation. Look around, look around at how unlucky we are to be literate right now! Obviously, it's death by a thousand papercuts for any learnéd student of English. And one of the most ubiquitous sins is the use of perfunctory and utterly erroneous apostrophes.
I chose this annoyance to kick off my new series of blog posts because A) so many things vex me about how people use words and B) I gotta put this B.A. to good use. There already exist far more useful and exhausting blogs about grammar, style, syntax, semantics, and punctuation, but damnit, it's my God-given right to express my profound righteousness every so often. Be assured, however, that I am not the type to bristle at new slang vocabulary being added to the dictionary or emojis and abbreviations utilized for everyday emails and texting. Colloquial language has its place and Shakespeare invented hundreds of words in his time. We don't want to end up like the French who actively try to omit new terminology from their official dictionary.
Fuck that.
So anyway, apostrophes.
The most egregious and most common sin is using them to form plurals. The Oatmeal beautifully illustrates the rules about apostrophes, but I feel it cannot be stressed enough that they should not be sprinkled everywhere like salt when they are to be used more like pepper. Still necessary, but not in absolutely every situation.
My favorite thing to HATE is when I see apostrophes being plastered all over signs for places of business. Seriously, folks, I am instantly 50% less likely to patronize your establishment the moment I see you pluralizing with a big fat apostrophe. If you can't be bothered to check the spelling/grammar/punctuation on a sign with only one or two lines of text on it, I begin to doubt your qualifications and your ability to function as a businessperson. But that's just me.
I mean, what is this devilry?
Oh and apostrophes for referring to whole decades or pluralizing acronyms--absolute garbage. Don't get me started. There are awkward plurals out there, yes, but how the fuck often do any of you truly encounter these unicorns? When in doubt, ASK THE INTERNETS. 'Nuff said.
See you next time for some other shite that irks me on a regular basis, like when people say things like "They gave my girls and I a special snack," or "I felt badly for them." *takes deep breath* I just want to help you, I swear.