Misuse of the apostrophe.

[Lucy Thomas]

It could be that I'm simply noticing more examples of apostrophe misuse than I used to. However, I do think that it is more widespread than it was. Several recent bad examples I have seen include the sign outside my local pub which states 'two course's for the price of one' on its menu board.

On the Centre Parks website there is a page about the amenities at each park with the heading 'restaurants and bistro's.

In my local Somerfield supermarket today there was a sign at the basket only tills which read, 'trolley's must not be used at these tills'

In the last example it is interesting that they use an apostrophe in the word trolleys but not in tills. Perhaps the author wasn't sure so hedged his bets to ensure that it would be at least half correct.

I think that the more this grammatical error rears its ugly head, the more it seems to be accepted as correct.

What do you think?

[Kat213]

Oh God that is terrible. Don't you think though that children are so used to writing in 'text speak' that they forget how to write properly? Also I was quite shocked to learn from my son that schools no longer mark down exams for poor spelling or grammatical errors unless it is an English exam. We were always taught that it had to be accurate in all subjects.

And I also agree with Natalie, absence of capital letters or punctuation marks is just laziness!