Greengrocers strike back

This week was really busy, so I did not have a moment to add more text to the Spring 3 web applications chapter. However, there is something I have to get off my chest. It seems that brigades of greengrocers have mounted a terrible attack on the English language. They use their ultimate weapon: the apostrophe.

We like to think that we can always keep up with the times, always trying to learn the latest programming whatsits, but we sometimes ignore everything else.
Let’s take a look at the dreaded apostrophe. Its prime time in English language was at the beginning of the 19th century. Back then, it was good form to add the apostrophe to foreign words ending with a vowel (mango’s and such like). During the 20th century, this use of the apostrophe was dropped and is now considered hypercorrect.
This overuse of apostrophes has led some people to use them even in the third person of verbs: I have seen abominations such as he listen’s and Tomcat deploy’s. Oh, the humanity!
On the other hand, some supermarkets are not using the apostrophe when they should: mens fashion is a good example of a missing apostrophe.
The moral of this rant is simple: we can be very accurate in our code; let’s be just as accurate in our written English!