Apostrophe Apocalypse

This is Autumn.  It should not have reached 36C today, yet by some evil work of Satan, it did.  And I'm hating it.  I have to try and get some sleep shortly, and I've got a recalcitrant 10yo griping from his room because we have dismantled the trampoline.  We had to.  The safety net was missing, and there are holes in the actually surface.  It looks like a big expanse of black Swiss cheese.

I know on the surface, vigilante justice is not right.  But there are times when it might be warranted.  Hang with me, I'm going somewhere with this.  For a while now, I've seen misplaced apostrophes on signs all over town.  When I am in charge of Australia, I'm going to have a law enacted that people will first of all learn when the apostrophe is used, which is in contractions or when an 's' is added to make a noun possessive (except in the case of 'its').  If an 's' is added to make a plural, then there is no apostrophe.  It's not that freakin' hard, people!  Now, after it has been drummed into everyone's skulls when apostrophes are to be used, I will make it a further law, perhaps a bylaw, that people will proofread before submitting any text to a publisher for whatever purpose.  Last night I went to collect my son from his dance class, and I saw a kid wearing a singlet advertising a local girls' sporting team, and I won't go into the complete name for privacy purposes, but it was an alliteration ending in the word 'Divas'.  Or it should have been.  But no, the singlet was emblazoned with 'D------ Diva's'. 

Pissed off isn't even coming close to describing how I felt when I saw that.  I have liaised with other members of my local writer's group, and we are very amenable to the idea of actually sneaking out at night, armed with the appropriately coloured paint, and obliterating all the misused apostrophes in town.  And there are lots of them.  To eradicate this scourge, we will form the Punctuation Posse.  Because the other willing participants are also female, we might be known as the Punctuation Pussy Posse.  We will see.  But we are going to take it upon ourselves to remove or cover those crimes against grammar with paint, or just some water and cloth if they appear on a chalkboard outside a pub. 

I spoke to someone tonight who thinks it's too late, that it's too deeply entrenched into society.  I refuse to believe this.  If people brainwashed by cults can be deprogrammed and/or de-radicalised, then certainly people can be made to not put apostrophes where they just should not be.  If it takes connecting a live battery cell to their genitalia and giving them a good zapping when they put that little arc where it shouldn't be, then that is what we will have to do.