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For the most part, though, officials tended to ignore the society’s complaints, saying that they had more pressing matters to deal with than a missing apostrophe here or there. And experts in language and cognition concurred, pointing out that a misplaced apostrophe was unlikely to confuse anybody, and, in fact, apostrophes could likely be eliminated from written English altogether with no ill effect.

Over the years, fans have submitted examples such a cafe advertising “light bite’s,” a warehouse offering storage for “boat’s” and “car’s,” and a restaurant selling “snow pea’s.

The research arm of dating site OKCupid looked at 500,000 first contacts and concluded that "netspeak, bad grammar and bad spelling are huge turn-offs"

correct use of apostrophes was appealing. Using "don't" and "won't" caused better than average response rates - 36% and 37% respectively, according to the research.

But grammar can be a linguistic minefield. Grammarians argue it ensures clarity and elegance. For others, it is a series of archaic rules beloved of pedants, bearing little relation to how people really communicate.

Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise "Rest Room's" or "Puppy's For Sale." People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won. Enlarge ImageClose Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.

How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness. Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang , which signals excited disbelief. Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.

Defenders of the apostrophe insist that it minimizes ambiguity, but there are few situations in which its omission can lead to real misunderstanding.