"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new  landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees."

Marcel Proust

Apostrophes

I reckon the game is over, the campaign lost. Aberrant apostrophes are now so ubiquitous that one ceases to wonder at the expense that has gone into sign-written lorries and vans, flashing neon signs, corporate annual reports and, instead, one just waits for the first dictionary to declare this common usage and make it official. Does anyone even care that Ofsted, charged with maintaining rigorous standards in schools, sends out letters to thousands of schools where they say zero's when they mean zeroes (or zeros - OED has both) and O's when they mean Os?

Given that you could fill books with examples from people who should know better, perhaps we ought to concentrate on size. What is the BIGGEST aberrant apostrophe you have ever seen? So far, mine is a massive advertising hoarding stuck to the front facia of PC World in Swindon which read "HUGE RANGE OF PC'S IN STOCK". Send in your pics; size matters!

The reason the game is up can be illustrated by the reaction of an accountant who told me that there was nothing wrong with MP3's (as in lots of them), then accepted, reluctantly, that there was but concluded that because "MP3s" didn't look right, he would continue to insert the apostrophe

On another subject: this, courtesy of younger daughter