Rules Rules Rules

There is a growing trend that I find very disturbing these days; an apparent inability of normally literate persons to comply with what they should have learned in grade school.

The homonyms seem to be a source of consternation among today’s writers. The use of “there”, “their” and “they’re” interchangeably was once upon a time, a novelty and a purposeful method of feigning ignorance when corresponding with my close friends. Or trying to outfox spellcheck in word processing and email applications (this is a sport unto itself).

Now I receive emails that say, “it was good to here from you…” and “hear we are having sunshine…”, and, “there coming in this weekend…” all NOT intentional word play.

Another of the mistakes made is the arbitrary placement of the apostrophe on words that are merely plural, with no possessions anywhere nearby. I even have seen signage, no lie, “Hair Design’s”…how can this be? I used to be mildly amused by the odd appearance of the “false possessive”, but now with business cards and posters and television ads and all sorts of other occurrences I am overwhelmed by the ignorance that is approaching epidemic proportions.

I am not a grammarian or composition whiz by any stretch of the imagination; just read this blog with any regularity and you will see that fairly clearly. But I DO know when to use apostrohy's and when knot two!

I don’t know who to charge for these gnu societal problems, but aisle find someplace to lei the blame!