Laurie Holman: Comedy Writer, Copywriter, Chocolate Connoisseur

I’ve been seeing garbled apostrophe usage all over the place lately. It seems to have sprung up and spread like one of those crotch-area infections no one wants to think about.

I mean, come on, folks. “Your” is NOT the same as “you’re.” The former is possessive; the latter is a contraction (no, not the painful kind), short for “you are.”

To illustrate, if I may: if you write “you’re an asshole,” you are calling someone an asshole, but if you say “your asshole” you are, in fact, directly referring to their actual asshole. Notice I said “their,” which is possessive, and means the asshole in question belongs exclusively to them; rather than “there,” which refers to a place their asshole might be.

I realize that, although most of us learned grammar and spelling in elementary school, not all of us retain all that info after a certain point. I suppose it depends on the kind of info your brain tends to keep and the kind it discards. I learned algebra years ago too, but now I couldn’t calculate an equation for all the hunks in Hollywood.

And for some reason, my brain has hung onto grammar and basic sentence structure, but now I find myself occasionally looking at a word and thinking, “Wait a minute — better double-check the spelling of that one.”

Spelling is apparently one of the first things to go after 40 or so, soon to be joined by one’s lips. We seem to lose our lips after 40. Where do they go? Do they get swallowed up by our teeth? Perhaps they go to that mysterious place where lost underwear goes. Somewhere in an alternate universe, there are all these young body parts floating around with someone’s boxer shorts. And abandoned apostrophes.

Check out Explode, a comedy thriller/mystery novel. Spontaneous human combustion, or murder?