I've always been a stickler about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. (Surely as I write this post, I'll make an error in one of those, but I always reread what I write several times before posting to ensure that doesn't happen.) I hate it when I see signs up that have misspellings. I hate it when people write or speak improperly. But the topic that this post is about is the fact that I hate the misuse of apostrophes! It's rampant! If you look around, you will see it everywhere!
Last week when we went to the zoo, I was looking at the menus and saw what is making me write this particular post.

There is an option on the menu to make your own pizza and it lists the toppings. Apparently, something either belongs to the topping, meat choice, onion, mushroom, green pepper, tomato, and "jalepeno" (jalApeno), or the food items are about to do something. (The onion's going to go swimming!) Apostrophes are only used to represent ownership or abbreviation, not to make something plural! (I guess the black olives luckily got off the hook for owning something or doing something.)

The rest of the menu is pretty ridiculous too. It looks like that, at some point, somebody told them that salads, "sandwichs," hot dogs, and sides don't have an apostrophe in them, and they took them off. However, they forgot to slide that S up next to the rest of the word. And on sandwich, they forgot to add the E. In addition to that misspelling, I found six other mistakes on there. That's if you don't also count the five places that they made two words into one word. Can you find all of the errors?

Like I said, the apostrophe error is all around you. Here are the ones that I have seen and taken pictures of. A few of these have been posted before, but they're worth looking at again for the sake of this discussion.

This one's funny because they actually left off the apostrophe in health's. The sake belongs to the health. :)

Storm door's what now? Glass maybe?

Mmmm... coffee's something.

I don't want to spend 99 cents on something that belongs to a tornado. Especially if I don't know what it is.

Same caption as last time... Violator's what? Legs possibly?

This one and the next one sort of fall under the same category. Misspellings of abbreviations. Luckily the one above was also apparently pointed out to the museum curators, because an apostrophe was added to the word.
it's = it is
its shows possession (i.e. The dog hurt its leg.)

Your what is on camera?
You're = you are
Your shows possession (Your really ugly car is for sale at the car dealership.)

Posted in: funny things, rant on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at at 7:54 PM