Apostrophe

I'm a word-nerd. I have an inner editor-proofreader, and she is snarky. Lately she has been squirming, but not in that pleasantly-sexy-squirming way, but in that oh-shit-my-OCD-is-sure-squirming way. (Lest ye question my word-nerdness, I'll just say that I creamed myself when I took a look at this WildWords game. Not-so-subtle gift idea!)

Lately I've been fixating on misuse of the apostrophe. The lovely apostrophe, though not nearly as fetching as a semicolon, is nevertheless a marvelous mark of punctuation. And so I lament! How it loses its power when well-meaning but ill-informed people toss it into a word, believing it necessary to make a word plural or past tense! I did it myself last week, writing that we had subpoena'd someone. My inner proofreader recoiled, and I rephrased the sentence, giving it a different verb, and looked it up later. (I'm sure you're aching to know that the correct spelling of the past tense to subpoena is subpoenaed.)

You want proof? Think that surely you are doing it correctly? Check out this wikiHow page on apostrophes. Or this grammar rule page. Or this one. Or see this site dedicated to Apostrophe Protection. Those Brits are oh-so-polite:

We are aware of the way the English language is evolving during use, and do not intend any direct criticism of those who have made the mistakes above. We are just reminding all writers of English text, whether on notices or in documents of any type, of the correct usage of the apostrophe should you wish to put right mistakes you may have inadvertently made.

For you visual learners, see the flickr pool of public apostrophe misuse.

Until I went to graduate school and well-paid legal writing professors told me that it is perfectly acceptable (in their warped universe) to start a sentence with And, But, or Because, that particular writing choice used to bug me too. And now I do at incessantly. So perhaps I just need some grammatic authority to tell me to get over myself for cringing over the alleged apostrophe abuse.

Maybe I just need to get laid and transform the obsessive-squirmy into some sexy-squirmy. Soon, friends. Soon.

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Pushing Liquids

After sleeping for 13 hours, I just got up to rehydrate. In the kitchen I downed a big glass of not-from-concentrate orange juice as I forced Chinese herbal remedies down my tight throat.

Next to my bed I have a nearly empty box of tissue, a quart of water in my beloved Sigg, a big glass of water infused with two Emergency supplements (2000% vitamin C!), and a huge cup of tea with two echinacea bags and two throat coat bags.

Now the trick will be to drink them all before falling asleep. Oh, and not wetting the bed.

Frowny Sick

I'm sick. Tired. Whiney. Headachey. My sweetheart is en route back to SLC, and I miss her fiercely already.

But I did manage to smile wryly at this.

And I also just heard from TW, the aforementioned sweetheart, about a narrowly averted tragedy in the form of an almost-lost fly rod, being transported by TW on my behalf, for J, who needs the rod to potentially snag something on his roadtrip tomorrow. Thanks, love, for seeing that project through. What a relief in the form of a white paging phone at SLC International Airport. Whew.