Apostro-phooey.

If you live in a city and you know a copy editor, you may wonder why her eye twitches and her jaw clenches like she's striving mightily to avoid picking a fight with oxygen. What is making her crazy is not the omnipresent and necessary element, but something almost as common in an American urban environment: Bad apostrophes. 

Of all the bits of punctuation, apostrophes may be abused the most. The little dance between parentheses and period at the end of a sentence are often screwed up as badly (as in this very sentence.) (This one too). But apostrophes are more common. 

This example demonstrates the way in which the poor apostrophe is most abused, dragged into service where he does not belong:

Heroes is of course the plural of hero; hero's is a contraction of hero is or is used to indicate heroic ownership ("the hero's hamster"). But you see this exact error on any Manhattan shop that sells big sandwiches. Something like "Our Hero's Are #1!" If you are using an apostrophe to indicate a plural, stop it. There's a perfectly fine plural version of each noun, and none I think requires an apostrophe.

A more subtle error was shared by a friend of mine -- less obviously wrong, but more egregious because it was found not in some mom & pop shop owned by non-English-speaking immigrants, but on official signage in the mighty box store PetSmart:

The friend who sent it to me A) knows I shop often at PetSmart and B) hates me and wants to see me furious. I am of course referring to the single open quote being used as an apostrophe. I see this error constantly these days, after having not seen it my entire life. I blame texting. 

When them is contracted to ’em, the apostrophe is used just as when do not becomes don’t -- it curls to the right. These are special characters and don't show up well online, but in a nutshell:

ʼem = correct

ʻem = wrong

Think of Dom DeLuise in Blazing Saddles yelling at you with a megaphone if you're ever tempted to use the latter. 

How many blinkered boneheads at PetSmart HQ approved that damned sign?

This last one -- well, it's so wrong that I hardly know where to start. 

It's from a bakery box, a box of cookies that were delicious. But their punctuation and capitalization are not. I'll leave the capitalization aside and just talk about the olé.

The bakery in question is Italian, not Mexican, so clearly they are not looking for the same olé! taste. They meant to say same old, just shortened to the familiar and cozy ol’. They actually had to go to some effort to screw this up -- it's tougher in most typefaces to add an accent to a letter than to use a plain ol' apostrophe, and the much-maligned Comic Sans font shown is no different. But the cookies are terrific*, so I don't want to expose them to ridicule. If they see this post, they'll know who they are, and can mend their ways the next time they review their box design.

Anyway, those are three egregious uses or lack of uses for apostrophes. Let's all try to do better in the future, for the sake of the many high-strung copy editors roaming our streets. Dom DeLuise is watching.

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*I know, it's hard to believe -- Italian cookies that aren't dry or all taste like anise. Mind = blown.