Rantings (NOT Ranting's)

Apostrophes are appearing everywhere lately. Especially where they don’t belong. I receive electronic mail messages with errors in them all the time. Should we do away with apostrophes? Apostrophe! PH, must be Greek. We can say the book belonging to the boy, instead of the boy’s book. Apostrophes show ownership. The problem is rooted in the difference between its and it’s. Apostrophes are used for contractions (shortened forms). They used to call them "contractions" when I was in school. The educational system thinks it is beneficial to change the names taught to children. The material is the same, but something like "carrying" is now called "regrouping." For parents who had trouble with mathematical concepts in elementary school this only serves to make it impossible for parents to assist their children in doing homework. I don't think it really makes mathematics any easier. And tell me what happened to the word "arithmetic?"

But back to apostrophes. “Its” means belonging to it. "It’s" is a shortened form of it is. And now that acronyms are so popular we want to write the plural of PC as PC’s. Plurals of common capitalized abbreviations are supposed to require an apostrophe. Maybe it should be PCs for several personal computers and PC’s for belonging to the PC. Maybe we should bring back periods. PERIODS, not "dots!" Remember P.C.? Or better yet, forget capitals and punctuation altogether and adopt the style of e. e. cummings. Wonder why he used periods in his name, but not in his poetry? I think chaos would break loose though if we did that. Maybe a few superfluous apostrophes are a small price to pay for world order.

Nevermind. Apostrophes may be overused or incorrectly used, but except for that, all is right with the world.