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       Punctuation marks don’t come much smaller than the apostrophe. Yet this teensy dot of ink can sure cause a lot of aggravation.

       It can aggravate me, anyway. My crusade against apostrophe catastrophes is what inspired me to ask readers what bugs them when it comes to grammar. Well, I’ve been calling it grammar, but it’s probably better to call it language: the agreed-upon structures we use to communicate our thoughts and desires through spoken and written words.

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       As I wrote Monday, some people ignore these structures, through ignorance or willfulness, irritating the rest of us. We’ll be exploring these language annoyances all week, but I want to return to what started it all: apostrophes.

       Gettin’ possessive: Let’s hear it for International Apostrophe Day!

       Some people dot their words with them, like an overzealous cook with a heavy hand on the salt shaker. When Arlington’s Kenneth Parent was at a motel in Gold Beach, Ore., this summer, he trained his camera on a pair of cups holding cutlery. One was labeled “FORK’S,” the other “SPOON’S.”

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       The motel’s staff couldn’t figure out why he was bothering to snap a photo. “But, the coffee was good,” wrote Kenneth.

       Jonathan Swiller is still shaken by what he saw 40 years ago while walking in midtown Manhattan. A restaurant window announced that the establishment served “duck o’range.”

       “This variant of duck a l’orange must either be duck cooked directly on the stove’s burner or else Irish prairie duck,” wrote Jonathan, of Highland Mills, N.Y.

       Bob Smith used to regularly visit a shopping center that was home to a bicycle shop, its windows festooned with stick-on letters listing some of the products available there. One such product was “TRAINER’S.”

       Bob said he often plotted ways to correct the error. He finally decided to state his case directly to the shop’s owner.

       “His response was devastating,” Bob wrote. “He looked at me silently for a few moments in a manner which said he thought I was a crackpot to be ignored, said ‘OK’ or some such neutral response, and went back to working on a bike repair. He didn’t care! The blasphemy continued!”

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       Eventually, the bike shop relocated after its lease expired.

       “A new business took over the space, the blight was removed and so was my discomfort,” wrote Bob. “Almost. Now I have to develop a strategy to deal with the new bar in town which advertises ‘CRAFT BEER’S.’”

       Even if that apostrophe is extraneous (and it is), I hope it at least is an apostrophe, that is, a figure that looks like a single closed quote mark, or tiny number 9, or a floating comma. In other words, curly.

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       It’s seeing non-curly foot and inch marks used as apostrophes and quote marks that bugs Joy Harrison of Eagle, Colo.

       “Most fonts come with lovely versions of curly quotes but more often than not, the lazy typist, writer, editor, ad person, etc., doesn’t bother using the proper keystrokes,” Joy wrote. “Instead, we’re being further dumbed down typographically, not unlike the loss of cursive.”

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       Silver Spring’s Cameron McFeeters is also driven to distraction by foot and inch marks standing in for apostrophes and quote marks in print.

       “It happens all the time, and no one cares or even notices,” he wrote.

       Cameron said that when he points it out to people, they shrug as if to say, "What’s the big deal?"