The apostrophe

Has anyone noticed how apostrophes are now misused?

They are supposed to be used to denote the posessive case or indicate missing letters but many people now place an apostrophe before the "S" at the end of a plural. IE: beer's, motorway's etc. This is surely not right. It should be beers, motorways etc. The apostrophe in a posessive case indicates that it is that which belongs to the noun. Plurals are simply more than one of a thing.

 Anyone know why this has happened?

Another thing which has changed is the collective singular noun. For example, when talking about the England cricket team  commentators will say "England are ahead" instead of "England IS ahead." The collective noun should be singular and thus indicate a group behaving as a single entity.

Our language is deteriorating worldwide.

Absolutely agree with what you say Mick (Syd.....sorry mate) but reckon it happens because we are all too busy 'doing our own thing'. There you go....another, quotes! lol

Tis tru ower langwich as gon to pott

Should also have said....guilty of it!

Errrrrrrrrrr, Mick? (Of course I mean't Syd I was just testing you!)

Seems you're working too hard just now Ron. (LOL)

Maybe I'm just a bit pedantic but maybe its because I was taught English (aside from it being our home language) by a prim and proper teacher named Miss Oakley. She would not tolerate sloppy english or sloppy pronounciation. She also hated split infinitives, posssibly as much as Sir Winston who once said (of split infinitives) "That is the kind of grammar up with which I shall not put."

Oh, and by the way, although our good friends in the ex colony acrosss the Atlantic have given us some very colourful language we must resist straying too far from traditional english.

We're also starting to rewrite common sayings such as "the proof is in the pudding" instead of "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." Sigh!

Cool man, that's cool....err wicked umm Syd innit? lol

(Not funny really is it?)

I'll edit that in a moment, but even you are trying to change the way we spell our words >>>pronounciation. She also hated split infinitives, posssibly

LOL, Ron.

It's been quite some time since it's been a colony over here, but just reading the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution shows how language changes, almost automatically, over the years/decades/centuries.  Everywhere you'd see an "s" in a word, they used "f's" in those documents.  And it was only one or two hundred years prior to that that the English were using all the thees and thous of the Shakespearean plays and King James Bible.  So there seems to be a natural evolution to language.

As for grammar and spelling, I'm afraid they're becoming a thing of the past.  There is a whole generation now, who are only learning to spell in "text."  R U OK?  ROFLMAO, etc.  Heck, they don't even teach cursive in primary school anymore.

And yes, Syd, I too noticed that British English always uses the plural collective singular noun.  That's very bad grammar over here.

BTW, I live in an area that was a Spanish, not British colony.

Muy bien, Jaime.  Tu?

BTW, I'm sure we don't speak proper Spainsh here.  More like Tex-Mex.

When I lived in Colorado a hundred years ago, I worked in a restaurant for a couple who were both Hispanic, he from Agua Caliente, Mexico and she from Spain.  She spoke proper Castillian Spanish and when they first met, they couldn't understand one another's Spanish.