"Your" Does NOT = "You're"

What did the poor apostrophe ever do to deserve such brutal treatment? I mean, seriously, we may as well start waterboarding it (not that we condone torture, because we don't do that in this country) or subject it to some other such treatment. It can't possibly get much worse for this tiny little piece of punctuation.

I'm not sure when it happened.

Sometime, somewhere, someone decided that it took too much effort to type or write the word "you're" (which, if you're playing along at home, is a contraction of two words: "you" and "are") and just went with "your" (which is a second-person personal pronoun). It's unfortunate that this "decider" didn't understand that "your" and "you're" have completely different meanings.

There are few things in this life that, as my grandmother used to say, "frost my kneecaps" (and NO, I'm not really sure what that means) as much as this. There is, however, one thing that does ...

TV's. CD's. Thunderstorm's (and I mean multiple thunderstorms, not that the thunderstorm has taken ownership of something). And so on and so forth.

When, for the love of all that is right and holy, was it decided that the poor apostrophe was to be used to make something plural? You see, I grew up with an English teacher for a mother. I was an English major in college. I have had it beaten into my head that an apostrophe shows possession (eg: "The Grammar Bitch's tolerance for misuse of the apostrophe is dangerously low.") Generally, all that is needed to make something plural is an "-s" or an "-es" at the end of a word (eg. "thunderstorms", "tolerances", "bitches").

Don't even get me started on the confusion people have with "its" and "it's" (I haven't yet had enough coffee to tackle that).

Lynn Truss, in her hilarious book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation expounds on this phenomenon in the sort of detail that I might if I had the time (the Grammar Bitch has little grammar-o-philes to raise). Even if you're not completely demented (like me), you'll find it to be a real knee-slapper (yes, really!)

In closing, I hope that you will strive for kinder, gentler treatment of the apostrophe and to take others to task for their apostrophic misdeeds (or, at least, laugh at them behind their backs). Because, really, what did the apostrophe ever do to you?