It's a crime when a society murders its own language.

Why is it that so many people don't know what an apostrophe is for, yet use it so much? Do they relate it to pepper on a bland dish to be sprinkled indiscriminately everywhere they see a word ending in an "s"?

's is either a shortcut for "is", or indicates possession of the following word. For example:

• It's raining outside.
• Chumba Wumba's world tour is coming here.

If you can perceive that "it is raining," or that a world tour of Chumba Wumba is upon us, then the apostrophe has done its job (Not "it is job").

Why the heck would anyone put an apostrophe into a sentence like "Penguin's are dancing"??? Could it be that the acroer speaks an obscure dialect in which "Penguin is are dancing" makes sense? Or perhaps the are is property of the penguin? DUH!

You're:
If you aren't saying "you are," then you must mean "your." You should have learned all this in elementary school instead of passing around notes.

Advanced Apostrophe for Morons

Okay. Say you want to use that possessive 's to show that some things belong to a lot of people, and those people already end in an "s". Here's what you do when phobias belong to a lot of crazies:

Crazies' phobias

Whoah! Too fast? Watch that again:

Housewives drool over coupons' offerings.

Can't beat them coupons, eh?

The quadruple threat award goes to: This posterchild for cretism managed to apply both apostrophe & capitalisation abuse, spelling "stinky" and "Aerosmith" wrong, and made this obscene acronym in a clean room. This reveals a lot about his hygenic practises - or lack thereof!