Second paragraph, you mean advisers, not adviser's.

Is it just me, or is incorrect apostrophe usage becoming more common?

At opening day at Wrigley Field, a statue of Ernie Banks was unveiled with Ernie's famous exhortation carved into the base:  "LETS PLAY TWO."

The base is being redone.

I saw a school bus recently -- a *school* bus -- with the following printed on the side:  "DISTRICT'S 271 & 273."

This trend can only portend the decline and fall of civilization.

Jhildner said: "At opening day at Wrigley Field, a statue of Ernie Banks was unveiled with Ernie's famous exhortation carved into the base:  "LETS PLAY TWO."  The base is being redone."

Let's just hope they don't get "Let's play two" right, but spell his name Ernie Bank's.

I have a poster of this at home:

www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Here's a blog after you're--er, your--own heart jhildner.

www.apostropheabuse.com

As for why this misuse of the apostrophe seems to becoming more common, I think it may have to do with the decline in the distance between our brains and our keyboards.  Before the advent of the PC and the internet, a typewritten document was more often produced in a formal setting--office, court, university classroom, etc--than is the average email or blog entry.  A typed document would never be let go without proofreading.  But blogs and emails?  No way.

My conscious brain thinks "you're" and the fingers type "your."  Both "your" and "you're" snuggle up against one another in the part of the language center that governs typing, and it's easy to get the wires crossed.  I have similar troubles with "hear" and "here."  

Such errors are probably not very much more common than they ever were for typists.  The difference is that nowadays none of this avalanche of verbiage gets proofread, and also that everyone and his brother is a typist, including lots of typing dunderheads who in decades gone by would have fobbed the work off on their secretaries if they wanted something down in typescript.

Hope someone else is aware that at the conclusion of the two step primary/caucus process in Texas, Obama not Hillary won the most delegates 98 to 95.  It is going to take quite an upset in the remaining primaries for The Clintons to pull this  one off.  Odds anyone?

My theory is that it's horribly horribly contagious. I've never abused an apostrophe in my life until the summer of 2001, well after my first email, when I was clerking for a judge and had to read this crazy long merit-free pro se habeas corpus petition, which abused the apostrophe every chance it got. This was my first exposure to this phenomenon, and I chalked it up to this prisoner's general illiteracy, but then I started catching myself doing it, to my horror. And then I started noticing everyone doing it all the time. Especially Matt Yglesias.

We have to stop this. For the children.

Who is Lee Hamiltion? How many voters will he influence?

Talk about hoping for job based on Convention Wisdom. He may be wise in foreign policy, but he sure is dumb in  politics.

If I was him, I would have waited until at least after the Pennsylania Primary. Although on second thought, maybe that is giving him too much credit.

Thanks for the links to the blog and the poster!  I don't feel so alone anymore.

I think the quick computer typing explanation as well as the contagion explanation works for those of us, like Noam, who occasionally make this horrific mistake even though we know better, but I bet that there are a lot of folks who follow the "use an apostrophe when it feels right" rule because they don't actually know the real rule.  It's similar to another phenomenon I've noticed -- using "I" instead of "me" when "me" is correct, as in "Between you and I" or "She's going with Dan and I."  I think this is overcorrection for improper use of me, but it shows that most people don't really know basic grammar, and I suspect that the same is becoming more true for apostrophe usage.  Schools should stop building kids' self-esteem every two seconds and go back to making the little snots diagram sentences, dammit.  And they should be fed gruel for lunch.  Gruel and sentence diagramming were good enough for me.  Builds character, I tell ya.

Lee Hamilton is just a go-along, get-along guy. He "served" on Jim Baker's Iraq Study Group. He was a weak vice-chairman on the 9-11 Commission; he just went along with the Republicans and failed to look hard at the Bush Administration's non-feasance leading up to the 9-11 disaster. Congeniality and obsequiousness to power, not intellectual traction and moral backbone, describes Lee Hamilton.

Noam writes:

"...it must mean that either: a.) He feels like the nomination contest is essentially over, or b.) He feels like the risk to the party of letting it go on and on outweighs the risk to him of getting on the wrong side of an incoming administration."

Third option: Lee Hamilton turns 77 later this month, and may not be interested in running the Wilson Center for another four years. Ergo, he can endorse whoever and whenever he wants.

Jhildner - yes, I endorse your theory! It takes me back to my preschool days, when I never quite knew how many sticks came sideways out of the pole in the capital letter E. So I routinely shoved a whole lot in there until it looked like the head of a rake. So this has intuitive appeal for me - I've been there. It's also like the Cockney thing where they drop the "h" where they shoudn't, and they know it, so they shove them in where they don't belong when they're trying to speak properly.