It's not as hard as it seems

I want to complain.  It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but why can't people get apostrophes in the right places?

I have been watching the incredible rise in the number of apostrophes used for plurals lately.  Or as they'd erroneously put it, "the number of apostrophe's used for plural's" and even "why ca'nt they get apostrophe's in the right place's". (sigh)

Apostrophes are used in English when letters are missed out.  They are used for possesive forms of nouns because back in Middle English you used to simply add "es" most of the time.  For example "the Kinges horses".  For some reason this got "shortened" to "King's" hence the apostrophe.  The "e" has been omitted.

They are NOT used in possesive pronouns, however, probably because they never had the "es" ending, but simply always ended in a plain old "s".  The prime examples are "his" and "hers".  You will frequently see "her's" wrongly used (shudder), but rarely do you see "hi's" (thank heavens for that).  But how many times do you see "it's" written in the wrong form?  I suppose the problem with "it's" is that the spell-checker won't catch it, as it IS a correctly spelled word, as the contraction for "it is".  However as a possesive pronoun ("the cat sat on it's mat") it has no legitimate place.

Apostrophes also used in contractions where letters certainly are missed out.  Isn't that right? Where "isn't" is actually short for "is not", and so where the "o" comes out, the apostrophe goes in.   Please get that right, too, people: the apostrophe goes in where the letters are left out.  So it's NOT "ca'nt" or "should'nt", it's "can't" and "shouldn't".

Apostrophes are NEVER used for plurals.  It is quite simple.  It seems people like to use them especially when a word ends in a vowel.  Their "quota's" are used up.  The "apostrophe's" are in the wrong "place's".  Of course many people use them to form "plural's" outright, unfortunately.  What really peeves me is when you see the inconsistent use of them such as in a menu.  You can have "tomatoe's egg's and chips" for instance.  (Yuck, I say, not because of the flavour combination, but because of the apostrophe misplacement.  Surely if you have "tomatoe's" and egg's" you need "chip's" (better still, since you have "chips" why not "eggs" and "tomatoes".  Hell, with the latter you're already adding an "es" rather than an "s", why chuck in an apostrophe as well?  Oh, I see it's a word that ends in a vowel.  Or indeed two vowels...)

We are fighting a losing battle with the apostrophe, as society becomes more illiterate every day?  Or am I wrong?  We are probably more literate (back in the 1600s only a small percentage actually could read) but since there is much more use of the written form of language, the total number of errors is increasing.  I wonder what the error RATE actually is?  Apparently back in the 1600s there were spelling variants abounding, and people just made things up.  I see nothing has changed.