Any thoughts on why so many people misuse apostrophes?

[Oeditpus Rex]

Last edited Sun Oct 12, 2025, 02:00 PM - Edit history (1)

Not here; I have yet to see a post with, say, "the Obama's" in reference to the couple or the family. But, on Fascistbök and other forums, I must've seen thousands of people put apostrophes before the 's' in simple plurals (or "plural's" ).

It's pretty easy to understand someone leaving out a punctuation mark (except for not ending a question with a question mark), but adding punctuation where it doesn't belong? I just can't understand what makes people think "An apostrophe goes there (or "go's;" it isn't limited to plurals).

Update: Since I posted this, I've seen apostrophes used to pluralize twice on DU. Also, ironically, I just noticed I left the apostrophe out of "isn't" in the final sentence. Mea maxima culpa.

[CincyDem]

1. Its a mystery to me. n/t

[markodochartaigh]

56. I see what you did there

[unblock]

2. I have to admit i'ts pretty infuriating.

[Skittles]

51. I see IT'S used incorrectly here a lot (when it should be ITS)

I mean, unless you're referring to something belonging to Cousin It, IT'S means IT IS

[unblock]

55. Not even then

Cousin itt's name has a double 't'.

"It's" always means "it is"

[Skittles]

59. ooh I didn't know that

learn something new every day

[Rebl2]

63. 😳

[The Blue Flower]

3. Ignorance posing as correctness

They just don't know the rule's.

[yellow dahlia]

5. .

[yellow dahlia]

4. One of my pet peeves.

As to your question. They never owned an Elements of Style.

However, I have noticed that texting sometimes auto corrects wrongly and adds apostrophes where they don't belong.

[Oeditpus Rex]

18. I'm an AP Stylebook guy

It was an occupational requirement.

Have you heard of The Elephants of Style? It's a short, humorous stylebook by John McIntyre, a long-time copy chief with the Baltimore Sun. He also wrote Lapsing Into a Comma, which I have. His humor helps you remember stuff.

[yellow dahlia]

21. I'll check them out. Thanks!

I probably use TOO many commas myself. I'm officially old.

[Oeditpus Rex]

22. I've rid my writing of a few

over the years, such as those that precede a quotation that doesn't begin a sentence. Essentially, I use most punctuation when it's needed to make the sentence clear or more clear (which is the reason I get into battles over the Oxford comma).

[yellow dahlia]

24. I am a fan of the Oxford comma.

[Oeditpus Rex]

25. As am I

When it's necessary for clarity

[bif]

65. Same here!

[3catwoman3]

26. Ooohh, those sound like fun. I'll look for them.

I still have my paperback copy of Elements Of Style, and 2 brilliant books by the late Edwin Newman - Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue.

[LogDog75]

33. I've owned a copy of it for over 30 years

I first heard of it when I took an English writing course through a local college while in the AF. It helped me immensely when it came time for me to write performance reports, review performance reports, decorations, and awards at the squadron and group level.

[Blues Heron]

6. Many times it's auto complete and they just leave it

[JoseBalow]

7. That's the crux of the biscuit!

(6:37)

[Oeditpus Rex]

19. Maybe Nanook could rub 'em out (n.t.)

[3catwoman3]

8. There is a pediatric dental practice in a business complex near our neighborhood named...

...Kid's Dental. I often go by it when out walking for exercise because it is so close by. So far, I have resisted the temptation to stop in and snarkily ask them if they only have one patient. Obviously, neither the owner of the practice nor the sign company they hired knew it should be Kids'.

And pretty much every mailbox that has a family's last name on it does it wrong - The Brown's, The Smith's, The McGregor's, The Rialdi's, etc. Almost nobody seems knows how to make a plural possessive when the word already ends in an 's'.

[Oeditpus Rex]

28. Yeah, that's my gut reaction

"Uh... which kid?"

We don't see many mailboxes with names hereabouts, but there're a few welcome mats with the same thing. Also, I don't think it's grammatically incorrect, but names on mats or in text like "The Williamses" make my teeth itch. I'd spell that "The Williams'." Maybe I'm wrong, but it just looks... well, it makes me want to repeat the "-es" half a dozen times, kinda like Daffy Duck.

There's a fishing tackle shop around the corner from us with a neon sign in one window that reads "Fishing license's."

[3catwoman3]

29. Another jaw clencher for me is "your guyses" for the plural possessive.

I've even heard Rachel Maddow do this!

[Oeditpus Rex]

41. I'd imagine Rachel does that

tongue-in-cheek, as she does with several othher wordthings.

[3catwoman3]

44. I hope you're right, but I've heard her say it many times without...

…ever getting the feeling that she was being snarky.

[DBoon]

9. illiterate people see an apostrophe in an abbreviation or the singular possessive

and generalize it to thinking any word that ends in an "s" should have an apostrophe before the "s"

Asparagu's for dinner?

[Oeditpus Rex]

32. No, thank's

You know what asparagu's doe's to your pis's.

[buzzycrumbhunger]

10. I'm a BIG reader

… and I’m sad to say that this ignorance even includes “writers”—though I think it’s a stretch to call everyone with a book that. Self-pub has really decimated the book world because ANYone can publish a book, and many people think they can have ignorant family and friends read their “masterpiece,” declare it a wonder, and off they go to Amazon to have it foisted off on an unsuspecting public without paying a proper editor to proofread and make corrections, full of wrong homonyms (“but spellcheck says it’s spelled right!”), tenses that jump from past to present in the same sentence, ditto genders, characters, names, places, and OMFG, the punctuation drives me up the wall! It’s depressing.

The most common mistake I can’t believe I have to keep bitching about is that no one seems to grasp that you “wrack” your brain. They’re all putting them on shelves, apparently. Virtually everything that would have made my fifth-grade English teacher pull his hair out is happening out there. Seriously, being able to bypass a publishing house has done readers no favours.

Sadly, I read so much and can’t afford to be picky, so I subscribe to a couple book lists every day and take my chances on freebies. The biggest thing it’s taught me is that I’m not obligated to finish every book I start if ignorance is out of control. Once, I would have been uncomfortable bailing on something I’d started but I no longer feel obliged to finish a book that has me making notes (I use Goodreads) to bitch about something every other page. *sigh*

[3catwoman3]

27. And you toe the line, not tow the line.

Here's another, altho slightly off topic. It took me the longest damn time to figure out what "walah/wallah" meant. I was seeing this word, if you can call it that, in a number of on-line posts, and it always had me scratching my head in total puzzlement.

It finally dawned on me that people who didn't know any better thought they were saying voila.

[biophile]

54. This is something I dislike heartily.

My French is very poor, but I do know how to pronounce voila and hearing “wallah” really grates on my ears.

[3catwoman3]

58. My eyes don't like it either!

[Oeditpus Rex]

35. Hell, you don't even need a vanity press

And they make a lot of money from the people you describe.

All you need is a computer, a printer with a lot of on-board memory and a "full service" print shop, like Kinko's (I dunno if they do binding, though). Oh, and spell check and grammar check.

Voila! (Or ""wala," as I've seen it spelled many times.) You're a published authorl!

[Doodley]

11. MAGAs tend to be as sloppy with their grammar as their facts.

[3catwoman3]

12. And speaking of inappropriate apostrophes, this grammatic atrocity makes me grit my teeth...

...so tightly I'm afraid I'll crack one - making a possessive out of the first person "I."

More and more I see this kind of construct - John and I's vacation, or Mary and I's car, or Mike and I's dog.

No, no, a thousand times nooooooooooo!!!!

[fargone]

17. I'se The B'y

I'se The B'y that builds the boat and
I'se The B'y that sails her and
I'se The B'y that catches the fish and
Brings 'em home to Liza

[womanofthehills]

13. I think people write sloppier on their phones

I’ll realize I didn’t put a comma after a phrase and rather than go back and put it in - I just say F it. I think same with apostrophes - it’s just punctuation laziness-

The more I post, the lazier I get with punctuation In fact, today I saw a name I posted that needed an apostrophe- but I didn’t correct it. Also, have a bad habit of using fewer periods & just keep using dashes.

[Oeditpus Rex]

37. Yeah, phones are a big part of it

You've got limited space, you're usually in a hurry because it feels like an oral conversation, and you're using only your thumbs on small keys. Plus, where you've got young people, you've got slang -- in this case, shortened words to accommodate the aforementioned.

Also (this'll sound curmudgeonly, but I stand by it), texts and other social media are most of what young people read anymore. So, they learn the mechanics of the written language partly from what they do read, and partly from what they hear. You can't learn spelling, grammar or punctuation from listening to other people talk. All you can learn is pronunciation, and that'll vary depending on whom you're listening to.

[UTUSN]

14. My elementary school level stuck for me. Apparently the MAGAts didn't care, didn't "get" it.

What bothers me is the not-needed-' for years/numbers, as in: (for 1970s) supposed to be '70s, not 70's.

[Oeditpus Rex]

38. '70s for a time period

70s for age.

But, yeah -- numbers get pretty abused in text. The general rule is spell out one through nine, but write 10 and up numerically. But there're exceptions to that, such as age, which usalways numeric ("He's 6 years old&quot .

Also, when did it become acceptable to omit the comma from numeric numbers of four figures or more, like "5000" instead of "5,000"?

And since I'm on this roll, you do 't need to wtite "dollars" after usin a dollar sign -- which goes first, as in "$50,000." And, with one million and up, it's "$1 million" because nobody wants to count all those zeroes, especially without commas separating each block of thousands ($10,000,000,000).

[CrispyQ]

15. Some of it anyway, is that people don't read much anymore.

Readers pick up a ton of grammar, spelling, & just how language works & flows, better than nonreaders.

[stopdiggin]

16. a combination of those that do not know - and those that do not CARE

and there are legions in both categories ...
With another contingent moving up fast on the outside - whose honest opinion is - "DOESN'T MATTER!" ( and, "get over it!" )

[JoseBalow]

23. Refuse, found in waterfront bars

(0:55)

[Oeditpus Rex]

39. And 'Meh, you know what I meant'

A lame excuse that's never used in mathematics.

[Silent Type]

20. I suppose everyone should proof carefully before submitting, but I'm cool as long as point is worthwhile.

[Oeditpus Rex]

40. And understandable? (n.t.)

[3catwoman3]

30. This post on FaceBook has me howling with laughter.

https://www.facebook.com/merriamwebster/posts/1181001840740532/

[fierywoman]

31. As a violist (musician who plays the viola) I find the sub of "viola!) for "voila'" to be pretty funny.

[Oeditpus Rex]

43. Seems like I've seen that a couple of times, too

Beautiful instrument, btw.

[LogDog75]

34. It's vs Its

This one sometimes makes me pause.

It's is a contraction meaning "It is."

Its is possessive as in "Its mine."

Too many time I've seen people misuse them.

[3catwoman3]

36. I read further into the list of pet peeves from the link I posted in my reply #30...

…and I was laughing so hard I was crying from this one - a claim that someone had seen a sign at a yard sale describing a fastening device as “rat shit straps” instead of “ratchet.”

It’s been at least half an hour, and I’m still laughing.🤣

[Prairie_Seagull]

45. That's f'n funny. nt

[Chipper Chat]

42. Drives me nut's.

[WestMichRad]

46. "It should be easy to see

The crux of the biscuit
is the apostrophe.”
-Frank Zappa

[Intractable]

48. Because they are tiny and easily misplaced.

For example, what possesses (pun intended) people to write 1980's, when referring to that decade. It's 1980s.

[area51]

49. One of my favorite cartoons.

[3catwoman3]

50. I've seen this one before...

...and could totally relate.

[Raven123]

52. No, it isn't

[bucolic_frolic]

53. They no teacha grammar no more.

It is .... it's.

[markodochartaigh]

57. One especially annoying misuse

is when there isn't even internal consistency in a sentence. "We have mangoes, orange's, sapodilla's, limes, and banana's for sale at the farmstand today."

[Oeditpus Rex]

61. I've seen that many times

Makes me want to ask them, "Why these and not those?" But, I doubt they know because there's no sense, no logic to it.

[Figarosmom]

60. Sometimes I get lazy and dont use them

Because it requires 2 taps instead of one to add the apostrophe. Note don't above.(auto correct will do it in the body but not the title line)

[OldBaldy1701E]

62. Well, a sizable number of people learned how to spell by using apps.

At the time, most of them had a 'count' of 435 characters, which includes spaces and punctuation. IN order to fit more into that defined space, one had to start dropping the punctuation in order to get all the words in. Now, this was fine for that application, but what it did was create a complacency in people when it came to proper punctuation because people started using the same methodology for writing in the real world.

I feel that some of them now cannot figure out how to write correctly anymore because of this. It is also humorous to read about the job applicants who cannot spell or write worth a plugged nickel and yet they cannot understand why they are not getting the jobs.

[Oeditpus Rex]

66. While there's certainly much in what you say

this is about adding punctuation where it isn't necessary, i.e. to pluralize a noun.

[OldBaldy1701E]

67. Yes, that is my point.

They don't know how to use it. Mainly because they usually don't.

[Rebl2]

64. They were

not paying attention in grade school maybe?