Admittedly, the blatant abuse of apostrophes in our society is not a grave threat to our way of life. Nonetheless, it is something that aggravates me — a lot. Most commonly, people make the mistake with abbreviations and acronyms, for example, “DVD’s” and “the 90’s”. Neither of these is correct.

For those who have difficulty with the matter, let me make it crystal clear: apostrophes should only be used to indicate possession—“Betty’s hairbrush” or “Ford’s labor costs”—or in a contraction—“he’s [he is] going to work”. If you want to make a word plural, most of the time you just add the “s” to it. (Sometimes you do something else, like “mouse” and “mice”, but you NEVER add “ ’s”.)

Other common abuses include the confusion between “they‘re” and “their” and “there” and between “you‘re” and “your”. This is, admittedly, somewhat more complicated and requires knowledge of grammar to solve. While we use apostrophes to denote possession in other nouns (remember: “Betty’s hairbrush”), it is improper in pronouns. For pronouns, the only appropriate use of an apostrophe is to denote a contraction—“they’re [they are] in debt” or “you’re [you are] in danger”. If you're trying to indicate possession, you need to use the words “their” and “your”, respectively.

The folks over at the Apostrophe Abuse blog have taken the rampant disregard for proper grammar to new heights of humor, skewering such malaprops as “Watch You’re Step” and “Open Sunday’s”. A few of my favorites appear below. If you’ve seen any such abuses recently (and who hasn’t?), email a photo and description to apostrophe.abuse@gmail.com. And don’t forget to tell ’em I sent you!