Melanie’s Share Your World questions this week come from her “partner in crime” called Evil Squirrel.

QUESTIONS

 When you just need to forget the world for a few hours, what helps you get away from it all? 

I read a good book or get engrossed in a movie or TV series that I really enjoy.

 If you woke up tomorrow with a unicorn horn extending from the top of your head, what would be the biggest advantage and disadvantage of your new appendage?

Disadvantages would be its weight and the inability for me to wear a hat, which I always do when the weather is cold. I can’t think of an advantage.

  What is the creepiest thing you’ve ever seen someone do, that you’d be willing to talk about, of course? 

Guys who grab or scratch their crotch multiple times in public, seemingly unaware – or not caring – that they are in full view of other people.

 What’s the silliest or pettiest thing that tends to really upset you?  

People’s abuse of the apostrophe. It seems as though they never learned that an apostrophe at the end of the word (or is followed by s) means POSSESSIVE. I have a friend who I care dearly about, but his emails are full of misplaced apostrophes (almost every plural word he writes has an apostrophe). This misused symbol should never used to denote a plural!! NEVER!

The weirdest apostrophe-used-for-a-plural mistake I saw was a few days ago. There was a sign up sheet for men’s and women’s breakfast at a restaurant. For women’s, the creator of the sign up sheet wrote LADIE’S. So she was combining two grammar/spelling mistakes: Changing the /y/ to an /ie/ when making a plural (she sort of got that right), and it seems she was confused about exactly how to make a possessive out of a word that is already plural. (There are two acceptable ways to do this: LADIES’ or LADIES’S, but the first one is preferable.)

An old writing buddy of mine published a book, a mystery set in Hawaii. Apparently she didn’t have it proofread, because every single word that ended in a vowel that was made into a plural (like the word “lei”), she added an apostrophe before the s. There were so many errors of this kind in the book that I deducted a star from my review on Amazon. How can someone publish a book and not have it proofread or edited? Obviously, since she is older than I am, she forgot this basic English spelling rule.

This may seem petty or silly to get upset about because there are many more important things that deserve one’s wrath, but it shows the decline in grammar/spelling education. It has to be this, because the misplaced apostrophe is such an ubiquitous mistake nowadays, but 20-30 years ago, it was fairly rare.

GRATITUDE SECTION (Always Optional)

How comfortable are you with meeting others who are very different from yourself? (no judgment implied.  Different in any way you’d like to think about – different cultures, different races, different mind set (opinions)? 

I like meeting people who are different from me, but I tend to be shy around strangers so I may appear to be uncomfortable. I am afraid to ask questions that might make them take offense; or I am afraid to speak to them in their native language when it is one I know (Spanish & Portuguese). I don’t know why this is – it’s silly really, but if I get to know the person or people enough to be comfortable around them, then I have no problem, unless their accent is so strong that I can’t understand them. In general, I like to be in places where a diversity of people surround me, where I hear a number of different languages being spoken, or I see unusual hairstyles, or the people are wearing non-Western but beautiful clothing. I’m also pretty open to trying new cuisines, although I do have my favorites.

So my gratitude is living in a country that has a lot of diversity – cultural, racial, ethnic, etc. I actually am looking forward to being in the minority (white, northern European origin). It’s a shame that many people feel threatened by our increasingly multicultural society.