You and I are on the same wavelength, Willow. The ubiquitous apostrophe drives me mad too. We have a local paper, the Warrington Guardian, and every week I sit fuming, while reading it, when the journalists have stuck in the odd apostrophe and also mispunctuated so the sentence doesn't make sense or have misspelled words. How do they get to be journalists when they have such a tenuous grasp of English grammar?
I think the funniest misuse of English has got to be on audio tapes we bought in Saudi Arabia. The tapes were very cheap, about 50p each, and there's nothing wrong with the recording quality but a lot of them have the song lyrics printed out on the inside of the covers, obviously translated by someone who doesn't speak English very well. Just an example, Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little 16"
Sweet little 16, she got a teenage booze
Tie dresses and lipstick an she know the news.
But tomorrow morning, she goes a change her train
She are sweet 16 and back in school again.
