I’m appalled that you’re appalled by bad grammar.

A New York Times letter to the editor from way back in February contains the following sentence:

Last year, I was appalled to receive a mass mailing from my son’s large, prestigious university prominently titled “Important Reading for Parent’s and Student’s.

A bit out of character from a university, but I always cringe when I hear people say they are appalled by bad grammar. Human language is the greatest crowd-sourcing experiment of all time. Its rules are fluid and arbitrary, and they are interpreted differently across cultures, dialects and epochs. There’s no room for “appalled.”

To be appalled by the “misuse” of an apostrophe is to be ignorant of the that mark’s relatively recent introduction into our language. Until the 17th Century, the genitive (possessive) case was commonly formed by simply adding an ‘s’ to the end of a word: 

… from the womans apartment…

And before the apostrophe ever indicated ownership, it simply marked the omission a letter from a word, as in:

salt of th’ earth

In modern usage, apostrophes connote possession or the elision of a letter or letters from a word, but we are also often confronted with using an apostrophe to form a plural, despite the “rule” that suggests we shouldn’t, as in:

Three of nine students earned A’s in this class.

There are plenty of other pesky constructions for which the apostrophe is often called upon to provide simplicity and clarity where strict adherence to prescriptive grammar would result in confusion.

The most we can say about apostrophe usage in holidays like Presidents’/President’s/Presidents Day or Mothers’/Mother’s/Mothers Day is that the decision whether to include an apostrophe (and where) is a subtle one, which in most cases exerts little influence on the phrase’s intended meaning. 

To prattle on about grammars that don’t perfectly align to your own is both solipsistic (not to mention *solecistic*) and unbecoming. In a world where language is used as a political tool to control and oppress, such petty bellyaching only serves to reinforce old notions of power and influence. 

(For a more thorough examination of the history of the apostrophe in the English language, see Piton and Pignot’s excellent article from last year. PDF here.)