extra apostrophe's really annoy me

[paperclippy]

...especially when they are on official promotional material's for companie's like advertisement's and sign's.

AGH. Apostrophes are for POSSESSIVES not PLURALS (unless you are using a number of acronym, although they may have changed the rules for that since I went to school). My trigger today was an ad from NWA saying "Come back Monday to see next week's clue's!"

This is such a simple rule. It is something you should learn by 5th grade. In fact, I distinctly remember learning this stuff in 4th grade, and as a result, when I see people making this mistake it makes me think, "Did these people ever graduate from ELEMENTARY school?" It is really sad that you can make it all the way through high school in the school system without ever learning the difference between a plural and a possessive. I can understand (somewhat) people having bad spelling, since that is more a matter of recall than strict rules (as there are so many unusually spelled words in English), but seriously. Grammar has rules, and MOST of those rules are easy to follow and apply to 90% of cases.

Actually, what bugs me the most about the apostrophe issue is that IT IS GETTING WORSE. I didn't see all these errors when I was a kid, or even when I was in high school. Over the past 5-10 years or so the number of official materials with these errors on them has increased exponentially. What happened? Did Americans turn stupid or something (more so than we already were)? Did everyone who graduated in the past 10 years never have a lesson in grammar? Doesn't anybody READ anymore?? (Well, nowadays they are probably reading misspelled and grammatically incorrect websites I suppose.)

Oh, and while I'm ranting about grammar, there is another grammar rule that used to be followed and is now broken all the time, even in published works (that theoretically were edited by a professional proofreader). When you use a colon in a sentence, you are NOT supposed to capitalize the word after the colon. A good example: this is not capitalized. An incorrect example: This is unfortunately capitalized. I see this in the books I read nowadays. WTF? What happened that changed this rule?