A case of the Tuesday's.

Said it before and I'll say it again: Of all the abuse heaped on punctuation, I think the most get heaped on the poor apostrophe. 

Seen last week: 

ARGH! Or maybe A'R'G'H!

I don't understand it. I thought I had cleared this up. Twice last year I had to post on the use and abuse of the apostrophe, but I admit one time my post was primarily concerned with the inappropriate flipping of the thing from closed to open.

This use of the apostrophe for plurals must come to an end.

It's really an issue for proper nouns, I know. Or actually any noun in English that starts with an uppercase letter. If there are two guys named Billy in the room and we wish to refer to them collectively, we hark back to grammar school and think "The plural of Billy is... Billies, as with lilies? That can't be right. Billys? No, that looks wrong. Anytime I've seen an S on Billy it's Billy's. Two Billy's. That must be right." But no! It's wrong, oh so very wrong.

Allow me to quote chapter and verse -- specifically Chapter 7, Section 9 of the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style: "Names of persons and other capitalized nouns normally form the plural by adding s or es." Examples given include "Sunday, pl. Sundays" and "Tom, Dick, and Harry; pl. Toms, Dicks, and Harrys".

As you can see, the sad thing is, our hypothetical pluralizer was right the first time -- Billy would not be pluralized in the same way lily is, although Billy and lily are both nouns ending in ly. Billys would be correct. We're so used to seeing Billy on its own that we're not used to seeing Billys. Not to say that Billy is lonely, that he's not a fun chap and good to be around. But we only see that S hanging on for the possessive Billy's. It's a matter of what we have seen the most, and that's where our eye betrays us.

Alas, the same goes even for days of the week, as in the sign above. I suspect that Mondays probably would have been written properly, because we've seen it, because of Garfield the cat and Office Space and even the Boomtown Rats.

But someone thought that Tuesdays looked wrong for that sign, and so we have Tuesday's where we should not. I could have corrected them, but they were busy and I didn't want to be That Guy. (Collectively Those Guys, not Those Guy's.)

Perhaps I should have, though. Had I been ornery and cantankerous and persnickety, they might have thought I was older than I look and given me that tasty 10 percent Senior Citizen Discount.

Although I think I was there on a Thursday.