Pet Peeve

I have a pet peeve.  It is grammar.  All my friends know this, and fortunately they don't judge me too harshly if I ever feel a pressing need to correct them, which I hope I do rarely.  My biggest grammatical pet peeve is the constant, insistent, unbelievable overuse of apostrophes---mainly on plural words where they don't belong!

I can show you this really easily:  A plural is a word referring to more than one thing.  Dogs.  Cats.  People.  CDs.  1980s.  All of these are plural words.  Notice that NONE of them have apostrophes--which are those little notches you see on contractions and possessive words.  '  See, there, that's an apostrophe. 

Plural words NEVER, EVER, EVER use apostrophes!!!!!  EVER!  NEVER! 

Here is why:  an apostrophe means that something is missing or left out of the word.  For example, in a contraction, there are missing letters.  Here's an example:  can't.  Can't comes from two words, can and not.  When you put them together into can't, they lose one n and the o.  Can not = can't.  Apostrophes are also used on possessive words, which are words that show that someone or something owns something (or possesses it).  What's left out here is trickier, because it's something that has been lost to us in the changing format of our language, but essentially--well, let me just show you.  John's bike.  The bike is John's.  It is the bike belonging to John.  Or, the bike of John.  We don't talk that way, so we don't really miss those extra words, but basically, that's what the apostrophe is representing.  It's showing ownership.  John owns the bike.

So if you write, "I have eleven cat's and fourteen dog's." You are actually saying, "I have eleven cat is and fourteen dog is."  Now, really, does that make sense? No, of course not!  That's not what you MEAN.  You mean to write, "I have eleven cats and fourteen dogs." What you mean is that you have more than one cat and more than one dog.  The cats and dogs don't own anything, and the words aren't contractions. 

This applies to words like: CDs, 1980s, 20s, Ds, and so forth.  It's a lot more common to see apostrophes here because people are trying to show that it's not "CDS" or "DS" but that's why the letters are capitalized and the little s is, well, little.  Same with numbers.  No apostrophe.  (I'd like to point out that the major league baseball team, the A's is a grammatical error.  It should be the As.)

Bottom line:  if it means more than one, don't use an apostrophe!  Just take an extra second to think to yourself, what am I saying?  What does this really mean?