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When I was young, I had a John Bull printing outfit which could be used to set and print type matter.   For younger readers, the outfit comprised rubber slugs of individual letters. There were enough letters to set a paragraph with a distribution to suit the English language ie a lot more E characters than Z characters.

To print, one set the required letters in a small wooden frame with the supplied tweezers, remembering to set from right to left. The resulting lines of letters were then inked with a small roller and could be used to print sheet after sheet of my masterpiece just like a real printer.  In fact, the process was not at all dissimilar to the commercial printing process of that time. 

Anyway, I digress. The problem with my John Bull outfit was that it was easy to lose the small rubber letters as one replaced, or 'dissed' them back into the box. You could run out of important letters such as the O. This got me thinking - perhaps it was this type of problem that caused people to write don't rather than do not. The apostrophe indicating that they were short of an O.

More recently, in an era of word processing, we do not have that problem or that excuse. What we have is an excessive and wholly unnecessary use of these apostrophes, which blind us to their proper use as indicators of the possessive case.

It would so good if we could get newspapers etc. to cooperate in printing proper words - they are not going to run out of the odd O, there are still plenty to go around.