FYI: Do you know where your apostrophes are?

My wife, Nancy, just sent me this tidbit (shown below) about a missing apostrophe on a public sign. I am not one to bemoan the failure of grammar in publication. After all, languages change, and I am the last one who should talk. I write thousands of words everyday. Unless it is vital my grammar be spot on, I decided long ago to forgo precision for clarity and quality; so, all I go for is a reasonable degree of precision.

However, searching for typos and non-standard grammar in public writing is both fun and healthy for students learning how to develop their editorial eyes; so, here is another possibility for extra credit. If you can identify a spelling or grammar error on a local public sign or newspaper, and you share it with the class using the email list, I will give you up to five points extra credit. 1/2 point per incident you report, and the 1/2 point goes to the first person to report an incident. I will also consider extra credit for pointing to places where humorous misunderstandings happen because of a spelling or grammatical mistake. [One of the favorite cartoons shows a big dog dragging a paperboy into a house. The owner is saying, "No. No, I meant, "Get the paper, comma, boy." {I said I was an English nerd.}]

Hint: Folks love to use "it's"--short for "it is"--when they try to show precession, as in, "its roof." There is also a local editor who just cannot seem to figure out that when two sentences are combined using a conjunction--as in, "and," "but" or "or"--one needs to use a comma before the conjunction. For example,

The sentences, 1) "He is going swimming." ; and, 2) "She went to the mall," can be combined as follows:

"He is going swimming, but she went to the mall."

Notice how the comma takes the place of the period at the end of the first sentence, the conjunction "but" is used as a logical bridge between the two sentences, and the capital beginning the second sentence is changed to lower case. The editor in question lets the following run-on construction through all the time:

"He is going swimming but she went to the mall."

What is surprising about the editor's oversight is that this is an easy error to catch. If an author is prone to writing run-on sentences, you get them used to looking specially at conjunctions and asking their selves, "Is this conjunction combining two sentences?" If it is, you teach them to add the comma, and the problem is fixed. Even a city editor should know this one.

Good luck hunting.

Steve
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There's a traffic sign at the end of the street where I live. It reads:

Please drive carefully, for our childrens sake

It's an official sign of the Department of Transportation. I imagine there are thousands of these reflective blue signs around the state of Washington.

These signs may not be necessary now. Children don't play outside anymore. There are more than enough Nintendos and Hanna Montanas and Facebooks these days to keep them busy. But that's not why I mentioned the sign.

We're missing something here. A little squiggly mark.

We may be missing an apostrophe here but, over all, the universe's apostrophe store stays in equilibrium. We don't put them where they belong, and we add them where they don't. Many a grocery store display signs such as:

Apple's $3 per pound

There's even a term for the gratuitous inclusion of these marks: greengrocer's apostrophe.

Sometimes we are not sure whether an apostrophe is needed, so we simply add one, as if considering pillars to support a roof. "Well, let's add one here; it may not be needed, but it's there if necessary, and in any case it's not hurting anything."