misused apostrophes

It seems like half of the apostrophes I see are used incorrectly. People get confused, I think, because they aren’t able to understand the difference between a plural and a possessive, and they get caught up in a tangle of s‘s and apostrophes. A plural means there’s more than one of something. In that case, you almost never use an apostrophe. The only exceptions, basically, are when you’re dealing with something that’s italicized (such as a book title, magazine title, non-English word, etc.), when you’re dealing with abbreviations that have periods in them, or in a few words or phrases where it’s become standard (“do’s and don’ts,” for example).

misusing greek letters

One of the downfalls of being a classicist is knowing the Greek alphabet, and seeing how often it is horribly misused makes me cringe. Most people having a passing familiarity with most Greek letters, either from high school math classes or college fraternities and sororities, and many people can even match each letter to its name. But knowing the actual sounds? Heaven forbid! So society is deluged with ad campaigns that throw in a few Greek letters with no regard for what they are except for having a passing resemblance to a completely different English letter.

omitting the serial comma

Ah, the comma. Such a versatile punctuation mark. One could talk about it for days on end, though I have to imagine there are better things to do with one’s time. For now, though one particularly intriguing usage is worth discussing. I’d like to talk about the serial comma. It is also called the Oxford comma, and, according to Wikipedia, the Harvard comma, but I’ve never heard anyone refer to it by the latter name.* For the sake of this discussion, I’ll just call it the serial comma, since using either of the other two names would serve to embolden the arrogant douchebags who attend either of the pretentious snotty universities in the alternative names. (Perhaps at a later date I will discuss my hatred for the idea that going to a big-name school makes you better than everyone else, even though if you’re smart enough to go to a school like that, you’ll probably do well in life no matter where you go to college.)