Cruelty to the common apostrophe

I feel like we need to meditate on this sign a minute. Let's try to figure out what the author was thinking. Clearly, they felt like plurals needed an apostrophe, but so did the verb "begin's." Probably they just apostrophized the final s's of words they liked, and so I'm wondering if they have a grudge against small appliances. I bet large appliances would have come up "appliance's."

I also notice that they left off the comma between "electronic's" and "toy's". Maybe they're really talking about the kind of electronics which are toys, as opposed to the strictly practical electronics, and they're not supposed to be separate items. Alternatively, they might feel the line break is adequate demarcation, but in that case you'd also expect "small" and "appliances" to be different items. This sign isn't really presented as a sentence, though the first two words could be understood as subject and predicate, so I suppose you could argue that the normal rules of commas in a list don't apply. But just for consistency's sake, since the other items in the list have commas, I'm not sure I buy that.

It also kind of interests me that there's no punctuation or connecting word between the date and the list of items. I'm wondering: does layaway only begin for the merchandise categories mentioned? Or are they just really excited about those in particular? Now I'm really curious about the sporting good's that aren't select. Who didn't select them and what did they do to deserve being left out?


...This is why I plan to home educate my daughter.

In which I am horrified by an apostrophe

We're all fighting off colds, so while the immune system is busy, we seem to spend a lot of time staring into space. Even Meggie stared into space briefly today, and then let out a little series of Meggie-sized coughs. It was the saddest thing ever.

Just now as I was staring into space, I gradually started reading the text on the love bowl. This bowl was a wedding present, handmade by a lady I knew growing up, and it's called the "love" bowl because the text from I Corinthians 13 is painted in red around the inside. It's very pretty. Anyway, we'd eaten spaghetti out of it tonight, and I vaguely noticed the line: "Love does not insist on it's own way."

Wait a minute. I concentrated. "it's" - yes, there was definitely an apostrophe. I rallied the wandering neurons and applied the contraction test for which "its" to use: "Does not insist on it is" - nope, doesn't work - the apostrophe is wrong! The treasure of our house has a misplaced apostrophe! In fact, it's a bowl-o! NOOOO! How could we have had it two and a half years and I'd never noticed??

So I mentioned it to Jonathan, who was doing dishes. He was horrified too. He cleverly applied the dishwasher's test to the apostrophe: does it wipe off when you scrub at it?

THE APOSTROPHE WIPED OFF! It was only a bit of tomato! Yay!!