“DO NOT use `apostrophes` or inverted “commas” in your listings. It will give an error and delete your listing!!
** Important **” – says a website upon which I am attempting to add a Pillowfish gig listing.

I have a chunk of text which contains apostrophes, describing the music. To rewrite this would take ages and end up incredibly clumsy and wordy. Yet to just remove the apostrophes as if they do not matter, which this site appears to presume would be the obvious solution, disgusts me.

There seems to be an anti-apostrophe movement in society which wants to destroy the apostrophe. I have attempted to counter it – twice in my life I have gone out in the night with a large black permanent marker pen and drawn apostrophes onto road signs where they should have been, but had been omitted. One was on Arnold’s Way, which was the road leading up to my school. Surely the lack of the apostrophe on the way to the place where we were taught correct punctuation was setting a terrible example. It was glaringly stating, “They may tell you that there should be an apostrophe there – but look! I was put here by adults in the real world and I don’t need one! So neither do you! You don’t need to make sense or be understood properly – just blither your way through life  and nobody will care…”

Another time I drew one in when the sign on one side of the road had an apostrophe and the sign on the other side of the same road, with the same road name, didn’t.

I know the actual rules governing where apostrophes should and shouldn’t go are hard to learn, arguably inconsistent and it’s often hard to remember all of them. But it’s when People Who Should Know Better, such as the makers of road signs, the Goverment and Boots the chemist get them wrong that it really, really gets on my nerves.

In the end I left spaces where the apostrophes should have been on the offending website, so that anyone reading it would know that there really was meant to be something there, even if it was invisible. It is actually possible to have databases that don’t break when apostrophes are submitted. It must be, or I wouldn’t be able to write them in this blog post.