At the Museum, we hold a day for kids once a year (though really, every day is for kids). We've been having a little debate about the proper punctuation of that day, in particular, where (if at all) to insert the apostrophe. (OK, we're nerds. We work at a museum -- what do you expect?)
I finally gave up and banned the apostrophe from the day altogether, but it kept sneaking back. We managed to print it three different ways, depending on who was writing the blurb, sign or article. Here are our varied approaches:
Kid's Day (a day owned by a kid, or as we put it: "It's your day!" )
Kids' Day (a day owned by lots of kids: plural possessive for you grammar wonks)
Kids Day (a day about kids, kind of like Reptiles Day. We Celebrate the Reptile, but they don't own the day.)
There's actually a movement out there to kill the apostrophe. The website's writer goes on about how it takes too much time and money and it's snobby or something. While writing this post, I also ran across a website for apostrophe catastrophes (extra points for the cute name) that's guaranteed to increase your blood pressure if you care about these things.
I've been keeping a collection of flyers, letters and notices from Henry's school that contain misused apostrophes, mostly so I can rail on about how public education is going to hell and how our taxpayer dollars are going to punctuation abuse. It's shocking. I mean, c'mon, teachers and education administrators getting it wrong? Shouldn't there be a grammar test before you can teach school?
Or maybe it is an archaic custom. Maybe we should just kill the squiggly little nuisance. But I think I'd miss it.
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