My seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Christophersen instilled in me a love of grammar, but I’m beginning to think it is something more. Love has turned to dysfunction, which makes me believe it is much more deep-seated than his fine instruction.

During my banking days, a coworker presented me with a plaque that read, “I am silently correcting your grammar.” I found it humorous - and usually true - but disturbing when another coworker chimed in with “Oh, I was going to buy that for her, too!”

My family will tell you the misuse of apostrophes puts me over my grammatical edge. It makes me crazy when it happens on something that clearly should have been proofread by another human, such as business signs, menus or television commercials. Even my father-in-law, a high school English teacher, suggested I ”just let it go” during dinner one evening when I spotted an egregious punctuation abomination on the menu. Recalling it brings fresh disappointment. I mean, if he’s not in my corner....

There are sites on the internet devoted to my particular fixation. I found two that were especially passionate, nearly militant. The Apostrophe Protection Society was started in 2001 with the “the specific aim of preserving the correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language”. I finally had to leave the site when a slide presentation of publicly misused apostrophes was more than I could take. On the other end of the spectrum, I found “Kill The Apostrophe”. These folks feel the apostrophe should be abolished entirely because it is redundant, wasteful, and “another tool of snobbery”. Needless to say, I was horrified.

What I found equally interesting and disheartening was that both these websites originated in the United Kingdom. It struck me that our British brethren might give a bit more of a damn about the language than those of us who have been brutalizing it since landing at Plymouth Rock.

I fear I am fighting a hopeless battle. But if I can save one business sign from stating “open Sunday’s from noon to 9:00” or a sign in an apartment complex parking lot declaring “Resident’s parking only”, it will be worth it. (After all, where will all the rest of the residents park?)

Don’t even get me started on its versus it’s.

In Defense of the Apostrophe