Before you leave ugly comments, I love my children. Really. More than air. But…wow…
CHILD: “I had an English test today. I made an 85.”
ME: “An 85? C’mon sweetie, you speak English!”
CHILD: “Well, it wasn’t a test on talking! It was a test on grammar, and no one cares about that.”
ME: “No, no one at all. Especially not English teachers who are right this very minute driving your skinny butt around a blind curve overlooking a 30-foot drop into a dried up river bed below you and could easily fling the car with enough force so that your door flies open.”
CHILD: “Whatever.”
ME: “Where did the test fall apart for you?”
CHILD: “It was all about apostrophes, and nobody’s gonna use those.”
ME: “Really? Think very carefully about your last sentence and see if apostrophes aren’t important.”
CHILD: “Well, they’re not important to me. I’m not gonna use them ever.”
ME: “Try again. Think about what you JUST said. Think about it sloooooowly.”
CHILD: “What? I told you, I don’t use apostrophes!”
ME: “You’re sure about that?”
CHILD: “I’m positive!”
ME: “Never?”
CHILD: “I’m 100% sure!”
ME: “Let me ask you this: Do you know what an apostrophe is?”
CHILD: (sighing…eye rolling) “Of course I know what it is!”
ME: “And you still think you don’t need them?”
CHILD: “I said I’m sure!”
ME: “Go ahead and describe an apostrophe to me, just to be safe.”
CHILD: “Mooooooooom! That’s dumb. Everybody knows what they look like. They’re this little squiggle thing.”
ME: “To be fair, you did just describe pretty much ALL punctuation with that statement.”
CHILD: “I just don’t see why we have to take a whole test on something that we’re never gonna use.”
ME: “And you do realize that almost every sentence you’ve spoken since getting in this car has contained at least one apostrophe? Sometimes two?”
CHILD: (blink)
ME: “That’s what I was afraid of.”
Just to keep the Apostrophe Awareness going, I really need for all of you to click on this article and read about one man’s successful crusade to save the apostrophe. As much as I am a fan of accurate grammar and I do despise sloppy gone-by-the-wayside attitudes towards grammar convention, I acknowledge that this man MIGHT have taken things a little too far.
Lorca Damon 
Apostrophes r great…..unless u r on 1of those irritating virtual keyboards. I cant even fondly apostrophe!
Touche’, my dear friend.
I feel your pain! I have gifted kids and punctuation always takes backseat to ideas. As a grammar geek, painful!
Absolutely. Even worse, she actually defends the point she tried to make in the post!
HAHA, love this not only for the grammar issue, but for the apostrophe focus in particular. That is my personal pet peeve — either abuse or neglect of that poor, sad little squiggle thing.
Funny story (IMO) — in 1st grade, my daughter brought home a notebook wherein each day, a different parent had written a nostalgic note about his/her own 1st grade experience. My daughter became quite vexed with me because, while reading the entries prior to mine, I corrected each erroneous apostrophe usage. My thought was that I was HELPING because I do not want ANY child to read through that and think, “If a grownup wrote it that way, it must be correct.” My daughter thought I was being a snob. Meh, whatever. Don’t send crap home from a proclaimed *educational institute* that is riddled with errors.
I would love to have the guts to correct the class notebook, but I live in AL. I would have to correct the teachers’ grammar from time to time!
Funny story from this school year: my daughter with autism is just an awesome speller and overall word person (written word, that is, not spoken). She never misses any words on the spelling pretest or posttest. She finally missed one! It was horrifying. Then I took a closer look. The teacher had marked “p-a-l-l-e-t” wrong, and had written out to the side: “p-i-l-o-t.” I started laughing and took it straight to her, demanding that she change the grade and give my daughter a 100!
I told her, “I know you! You’ve lived in this little town for sixty years and you think you said, ‘Pilot,’ but you pronounced it, ‘Paaaa, let.’ Now fix it!” And she did!
No, honestly. My spouse and I discussed the apostrophe last evening. Is it still called an apostrophe if you use it at the end of a regular word like “loving” and you want the person to be saying “lovin’ ” like southern dialect, for instance? We decided that, yeah, it is still an apostrophe because it is in place of a letter that is left out. And what else could you call it? When you have been married this long you get around to just about everything.
I’m just thrilled to death that someone on the planet gets to have mini debates about insightful, intellectual things. My husband is in the bedroom watching Wreck It Ralph. Why no, the children aren’t watching it with him.
LOVE this. And I love how he’s/she’s so adamant that she’ll never use the dreaded and useless apostrophe.
Completely. In her defense, she later explained to me that you can’t HEAR the apostrophe when you talk. Wow.
Funny piece with serious intent–the best kind of funny, the best kind of serious. English teachers have a lot to answer for in creating the need for apostrophe police. “The Grammar Hatchet” was my blog post yesterday.
http://katenonesuch.com/2013/03/20/the-grammar-hatchet/
Awesome! I’m gonna steal that, but I’m going to wield the Grammachete!