All About the Apostrophe

Last week Brad Pitt kindly pointed out to me that I wasn’t using an apostrophe when spelling the word “its” and it was driving him crazy. I told him I didn’t think it mattered much, my point was still received and of all the words that someone could misspell, that one is really irrelevant. Let it be known that I’m a typo fiend. My eyes tend to fall immediately on typos and it drives me nuts when I find them anywhere from professional publications to friend’s Facebook statuses. The Facebook typos really bother me because many people just look plain stoopid with their misuse of “your” and “you’re” and other common, but super annoying mistakes. I think it particularly drives me crazy because I went to school with at least half of my Facebook friends and I think to myself “Seriously?!?! We received the same education and you can’t differentiate between Then and Than?!? But I’m getting off on a tangent. And supposedly I’m being hypocritical because I’m totally throwing typos out left and right with my misuse of its.

So Brad Pitt tells me “You really need to use an apostrophe when you are using it’s as a contraction.” And I said “That’s nice, but I don’t want to. It takes too much effort.” It does. Why waste my time stretching my little pinky finger over to the apostrophe key when I could keep hammering away on the rest of my words to get my fabulous story out to the world? Plus, when people can’t figure out when to say “their” versus “there,” I’m pretty sure I’m in the clear. I told him “Listen, people are lucky I’m bothering to capitalize words, let alone useless punctuation. I really prefer to just type in all lower case. So give me a break. If I ever get a book deal out of this blog, I’ll go back and make sure the word ‘its’ has all the necessary apostrophes.” He gave up and left the room.

I did take time to make sure he was right. And he was. But, theOatmeal.com says “When in doubt, don’t use an apostrophe.” And I doubt I will ever want to use an apostrophe when I type “its,” therefore I won’t be using one. Call me an apostrophobic.* I don’t care.

*What does a girl have to do to coin a term?!? I totally thought I finally created a new word and was let down again. Damn it Urban Dictionary!