Someday, I will publish a coffee table book that will be filled with beautiful, artistic photos of public signs with misused apostrophes. It will be 536 pages long. That will be the first volume.
I don’t consider myself a grammar nut. I’m not the punctuation police by any stretch. I don’t dissolve into puddles over these things (like the poor sap in this cartoon … click to enlarge). They don’t offend me.
Truth is, I find screwups like misplaced apostrophes, you’re vs. your and — here’s a big one — they’re, their and there relatively amusing. I take pleasure, yes, in other people’s problems with basic English. Sue me, but I find it hard to fathom how people can get through grade school without knowing it’s from its or its‘ (that’s a trick!).
On the driving range near my house, the one I use when I’m thinking about truly, honestly taking the game seriously and practicing a couple times a week — that usually lasts less than a week — there are signs:
GRASS TEE’S ONLY
They don’t want you hitting off the plastic mats, I guess. Or the mat’s.
The examples are endless. But I’m saving them for the book, working title My Little Squiggle. It will sit beside my other coffee-table book, Bad Shoe, which will showcase beautiful, artistic photos of shoes on the side of the street.
Dang. Facebook has everything. Dammit.
Apostrophes are the worst. I always wonder if we’re worse as a society or if the masses are simply writing much more in the public eye than they were 10 or 50 years ago.
I love when it’s something that has some relative permanence, like a storefront or a T-shirt.
I would buy that book, and others would too, some rather possessive when they shouldn’t be, and vice versa.
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