somniloquence

Oh, I love this icon!! thank you soooo much, you are so kind. I was telling everyone about it at a get together last night.

re the apostrophe on things like CDs and such -- there are two things at work. One is sheer ignorance, because most people just don't understand how to use an apostrophe, and so they put it in places they *think* it should go, but normally may not. Let's face it, learning grammar and punctuation aren't easy, and we teach them so badly that it makes it even worse.

the other thing is that, as Unovis notes below, in some environments that started because there was no way to denote the lower-cased s (heads used to often be in all caps), so plurals of capital letters end up with an apostrophe (this is addressed in the main journalistic stylebook, the Associated Press). I think most people, too, got used to seeing that, and thought it was "correct" -- which is why I always try to focus on misunderstandings and confusion, because correct can really be in the eye of the beholder.

I won't say it doesn't make me nuts. But I know of someone who literally went nuts trying to correct those things on public signs, so... brrrr. Don't want to go there. The one that gets me every time though is years -- it's '70s, not 70's (mostly). The apostrophe stands in the the missing 19, but try to convince people of that. I hear Psycho violin music whenever I see that.