Glaring apostrophe error in a book about law for the layman

Ed. has just renewed his membership in the Grammar Police. He has this advice for those who aspire to be published writers.

Apostrophes give many writers a lot of trouble. Sometimes, you might be tempted to put an apostrophe where it does not belong, such as when you are simply making a word plural. 

Other times, you need to make a word possessive, but you might forget to use the apostrophe. 

Then, of course, there is that whole its / it’s thing that confuses most everyone. Remember, the rule is to use an apostrophe when you need to show possession or ownership. 

The exception is with possessive pronouns such as my, your, his, hers, ours, their, and its. "Its" shows ownership while "it’s" is a contraction for "it is". So, just like "hers" and "his" are possessive pronouns that don’t use an apostrophe to show possession, "its" follows the same format. 

For more information on the apostrophe, be sure to check out the Apostrophe section in the Punctuation area of Grammar Essentials of the Excelsior Online Writing Lab. If you just need to brush up your skills, visit the Apostrophe Refresher. 

If  you don't follow these rules, you might end up with a sentence like this: 

Its abundantly clear to me that the rule’s of English grammar can be confusing and following it’s many exceptions even more so! 😒

WRONG! The sentence should read (and be punctuated) like this.

It’s abundantly clear to me that the rules of English grammar can be confusing and following its many exceptions even more so! 😀

Quick quiz: See how many apostrophe errors you can find in the title of the book pictured at left.

Answer: "Juror's", "Sheriff's", "Bailiff's", and "Justice's" are all WRONG, using the possessive form where the plural is wanted. This is not a joke, but a real book, advertised on the Thriftbooks website. We'll have to give the author a pass, as he's obviously a product of American education. And yes, "we'll" and "he's" are correct. They are contractions of "we will" and "he is".

UK grammar vigilante tackles apostrophe error's

Ed. here. Assiduous readers will know that the abuse and misuse of the humble apostrophe (') makes me [and Walt! Walt] wild. Sometimes we think we are alone in our campaign to stamp out egregious errors such as "It pay's to go Peugeot!" or "The Anderson's", referring to a family named "Anderson" who presumably live in the house so sign-posted. We are therefore encouraged by reports of others who are fighting the good fight for grammatical correctness. Agent 34 sends along this one, from the education section of The Grauniad.

For more than a decade, an unidentified corrector of poor English has been venturing out in the dead of night and tidying up the punctuation on store fronts and street signs in Bristol, England. On Monday, the BBC announced it had tracked him down and had accompanied him on one of his night-time missions.

The first sign he tackled, the man said, was council sign -- "Monday's to Friday's" -- and had "these ridiculous apostrophes, which I was able to scratch those off." He also corrected fixed a "gross" shop sign which read "Amys Nail's". "It was so loud and in your face. I just couldn’t abide it. It grates," he told the Beeb. Here we see him sorting out "Cambridge Motor's". The owners of the business thanked him for correcting the mistake.

The still unidentified language purist told the BBC, "I'm a grammar vigilante. I think it's a cause worth pursuing." He said he began by scratching out an extraneous apostrophe on a sign, but had since become more sophisticated and has built an "apostrophiser" -- a long-handled tool that allows him to reach up to shop signs to add in, or cover up, offending punctuation marks. "This is a device that enables you to plant an apostrophe quite high up and get over any obstacles," he said.

He also has a specially made stepladder that means he does not have to lean a conventional ladder against shop windows, and carries a set square and scalpel to make sure his work is neat and precise. When it was put to him that what he was doing was probably illegal, his defence was staunch: "I’m sticking on a bit of sticky-back plastic. It's more of a crime to have the apostrophes wrong!"

For lovers of the English language

Ed. here. Walt has taken a couple of days off to ponder the meanings (if any) of the Republican and Democratic conventions. He is trying to figure out why any American would not vote for Donald Trump. In his absence, to fill the space, I have lifted a couple of posts from a bulletin board for ESL teachers....

On the importance of correct punctuation:

What's the difference between making love to twenty-nine year olds and twenty nine year olds? 25 years to life!

Never date an apostrophe. They can be possessive.

Two limericks:

There once was a man from Japan
Who wrote poetry no-one could scan
When told it was so
He replied, "Yes, I know
But I like to get as many words into the last line as I can."

There once was a gasman named Peter
Who, while trying to read an old meter
By chance struck a light
And blew out of sight
And, as anyone who knows anything about the structure of English poetry will tell you, also ruined the meter.

And finally:

A knock was heard on the Pearly Gates.
"Who's there?", Saint Peter said.
"It is I", replied the voice from without.
"Go to hell," said Saint Peter. "We've got enough English teachers here."

Bill Bryson on declining standards of punctuation and grammar

Ed. here. Bill Bryson, best known for his travel books, has also written two fine books on the development and use of the English language. Mother Tongue and Made in America occupy positions of honour in Walt's working library. Mr. Bryson is also a stickler for proper usage of our language, as witness the following excerpt from his latest book, The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). Walt's working on a review, but showed me this passage (pages 220-222), which I couldn't wait to share with you.

On the platform at Cambridge station was a poster for a Jeremy Clarkson book. It had a photo of Clarkson looking adorably doleful and a caption that read: 'Dads. Everything they say. Everything they do. Everything they wear. Its all completely wrong.' Oh, the wit. But note the absence of the apostrophe in 'its'. I know it is way too much to ask that Jeremy Clarkson should take an interest in the literacy of his posters, but surely someone at Penguin ought to care.

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but evidently don't realize that there are fundamentals. Many people...seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle indiscriminately through any collection of words. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: 'Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results'. All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is 'the daily Telegraph'? Is it really possible to be that unobservant?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an email from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in the UK. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: 'Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families...'

In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and got the name of her own department wrong - this from a person whose job it is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a paediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word children's twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children's specialist working in a children's hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

People everywhere have abandoned whole elements of grammatical English, and I don't understand it.I was watching a Brian Cox television documentary in which he was standing in a field in Mexico talking about bombardier beetles when he said: 'The bombardier beetle and me, and in fact every living thing you can see, are exposed to the same threat... Me and my friend the beetle have both reached the same solution.' Now don't get me wrong. I have great respect for Brian Cox. He has a brain so big that it crosses whole time zones, and he is normally impeccable with the language, so why on earth would he say 'the bombardier beetle and me' when it is surely more natural, and clearly more respectable, to say 'the bombardier beetle and I'?

Soon after this, I watched a documentary by another eminent young scientist, Adam Rutherford, and he said: 'Now I've got just 33 vertebrae in my spinal column, but Belle here [a boa constrictor] has got 304, and the amazing thing is it's the same handful of genes that determine how many vertebrae both me and her have.'

Then I was watching a repeat of Outnumbered, which had this snatch of dialogue in it:
          Outnumbered kid: 'Why do I have to look after Karen?'
          Hugh Dennis: 'Because me and Mum and Ben are going to be at Ben's parents' evening.'
Hugh Dennis was educated at Cambridge in real life, and he plays a teacher who should really know better.

Then I heard Samantha Cameron, wife of the Prime Minister, say to a television interviewer, 'Me and the kids help to keep him grounded.'

So here is all I am saying about this. Stop it.

Apostrophe catastrophe

Went to town today and stopped at my favourite coffee shop -- hint: no lattes on offer there -- and found they have a new feature. Yessir, Vince has joined the wired world and is now offering a wi-fi section "for the convenience of our customer's". Sic.

Why "sic"? Because "customer's" is the possessive form of the noun "customer". I was left wondering...the (one) customer's what? The customer's cat? The customer's maiden aunt?

It's not Vince's fault. Misuse of apostrophes is everywhere these days, even in the media and the sign-painting community. I'm not talking about the endemic confusion of "its" and "it's"*, but such egregious errors as "It pay's to go Peugeot" and signs indicating that a cottage belongs to "the Smith's".

For those who went to school after "child-centred education" took hold, Walt presents the rules...

1. Use an apostrophe to indicate possession.
a) With nouns (both singular and plural) that do not end with the letter s, add an apostrophe and s. Canada's climate consists of nine months of winter and three months of bad skiing.

b) With plural nouns that end with s, add only an apostrophe. Flight attendants' duties include telling passengers to stay in their seats.

c) With singular nouns that end with s, add either the apostrophe alone or both the apostrophe and s, depending on which authority you choose to follow. William Strunk says you should always add 's, regardless of the final consonant. Thus, the witness's testimony.
An exception might be made for proper names ending in s: Jesus' robe, Dickens' novels, but certainly not Dicken's novels (because the author's name is Dickens, not Dicken)!

d) If possession is common to two or more individuals, only the last name takes the apostrophe: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
But if possession is not common, make each noun possessive: men's, women's and children's wear.

2. Use an apostophe in contractions to indicate omission of letters or numbers. Summer of `42 (not Summer of 42), can't, won't, he's, they're (for they are, not their or there!), you're (for you are, not your!!!), isn't, it's.

* Here's an easy way to remember the distinction between it's (the contraction) and its (possessive). It's raining outside so the dog went into its kennel.

3. Use an apostrophe with nouns that are followed by a gerund. Don't bother looking up "gerund". Here's an example: Walt's overeating led to three days of indigestion.

4. English being English, there are a couple of "special cases".
a) to form plurals of abbreviations that have periods: Ph.D.'s
b) with letters, where addition of s alone would be confusing: Mind your p's and q's!

All of which is fine, but begs the question: does anyone care any more? Perhaps not, but if you're writing, there's no harm in appearing to be literate, but great potential harm in the opposite. Think résumés...not résumé's.