When I went to school, in the '60s and '70s, not many people misused the apostrophe.
At least not for long, 'cause if they did, not only did they get bad marks, but all sorts of general abuse.
They're simple rules, really*. It usually doesn't take the average child more than a couple of days - or corrections - to understand them.
It seems that starting with the '90s... they somehow became the 90's.
Now, the 90's what, exactly, I wonder.
The decade? The fad? The illiteracy?
This is so widespread - and getting worse - it makes my head spin.
They're everywhere. Not only on social networks, mind you, which is to be expected if not accepted. We all know the infinite-monkey theory - as applied to the internet.
They're on billboards. In newspapers. TV captions, shop signs, you name it.
Author Karin Winegar, in "Can't We Stop This Plague of Errant Apostrophes?" (March 25, 2019) reports seeing them (repeatedly) in the New York Times:
"I have even spotted this plague in the usually impeccable New York Times: a headline in the Sunday, March 24, 2002 arts section (p29) announced to several million readers that there were "Bravo's in the Hall." And then there was "The cartoon's aren't..." (Sunday March 31, 2002 pg. 10 Week in Review. Shhh! We're Trying to Surf)."
What's worse, try correcting someone about it. Actually, don't. You won't like the results.
One case in point: on an online forum I use, they have a section, Documentation.
In there, they have "How-to's" (basically meaning tutorials). It's mentioned twice, just in the headers.
I wrote (privately) to an administrator, saying look, not trying to be a bother, I realise it's not a literary forum, and so on, I think those apostrophes don't look too good.
He replied saying "it's acceptable, they stay." Citing a Stackexchange post where the most literate user probably never made it past 3rd grade, which cited "as evidence" an entry in the "open" section of an online dictionary, "submitted from [sic] Nikolay Akakyevic [name changed] from Russian Federation on 25/12/2015"
* The rules are so simple regarding plurals, actually, there's only one rule: you never use an apostrophe to make a plural. Period.
There is supposed to be one exception (no, the one about abbreviations in not real). Plurals of lowercase letters - the (in)famous "mind your p's and q's".
The idea being that if they're capital letters, like Ps and Qs, it's clear enough. ps and qs "can be doubtful".
Oh well. Nobody writes that anyway - and with good reason. It's ugly.
