The Deterioration of Proper Grammar
I have in front of me a Map of Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas and it's Subdivisions and Improvements - emphasis mine, but the apostrophe belongs to A.C. Pillsbury, civil engineer, August 2020.
Historical perspective for my your next apostrophe rant, free of charge.
Off on a (semi-)related tangent: didn’t Teddy Roosevelt during his Presidency attempt to get Congress to pass a bill ’simplifying’ several spellings for all government documents, such as ‘thru’ for ‘through’, ‘tho’ for ‘though’, etc. (or did I just dream that one too?…)
i know germans did pass a similar bill.. and apparently it worked. although i might be imagining stuff.
As a result of those kinds of laws, Belgium and the Netherlands have to maintain friendly relations so they can have international treaties on spelling. But imagine if we tried that for English under the current regime in the FDRUSA! “Nucular” would be the least of it. For every Anglophone country that failed to support the next war, we’d have to learn a whole set of new spellings designed specifically to piss that country off…