It’s old, it’s useless, it’s annoying and according to one linguist, the Internet bell doth toll for the apostrophe, among and other arcane punctuation.

‘People are absolutely confused about punctuation, particularly about apostrophes,’ says Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of Alphabet to Email: How written English has evolved and where it’s going.

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As for the assertion that Google “doesn’t care” about punctuation, compare searches of “it’s” and “its”, “side’s” and “sides”, or your own combination. There are plenty of differences in the results lists.

I hope you can settle this dispute. I teach high school and the cheerleaders painted a banner for the hallway. It reads, ‘Lady Q’s drown the opposition.’ ‘Q’ is short for Quarriers; the town is known for its quartzite quarry. I maintain that there should not be an apostrophe after ‘Q.’ After some research online, in the school library and a couple of textbooks, we were unable to come up with a conclusive answer. Can you resolve this?

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On a late spring morning in 2005, a group of grandmothers from Pensacola, Fla., appeared on television in a Times Square crowd outside the Good Morning America studio. On a sign borne by one of the ladies, the following appeared:

GRANNYS’ GONE WILD

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“I have just returned from the Good Friday service at The Stations of the Cross,” said Eula Myers as Bubba replaced her windshield wipers at Wade’s Dixieco. “The program booklet told of Jesus suffering, Jesus journey, Jesus mother, Jesus cross, etc. Should this have been Jesus’s?”

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