"Your so wrong"

The book I'm currently reading, a novel titled "The Expected One", is about Mary Magdalene and the story / gospel she wrote about the life of Jesus . I am not a religious person. Not at all. But I chose the book for the same reasons as for the Da Vinci Code: controversial, a beautiful story, a blend of legacy, history and the modern world.

But it's not the book I wish to discuss... In it I came across one of the 'everyday' English Language crimes: people's inability to use punctuation properly for showing that letters are missing or for ownership, as demonstrated by the heading of this blog (intentionally of course!). In the book I came across this gem: "You're work isn't exactly his thing". I was really stunned, because I cannot conceive how it made it through to production (well, mass production to be precise). Yes, I know that MS Word and the like cannot pick this as a grammatical error when Spell-Checking; but what the hell??? The author herself, the reviewers, the publishers, the pre-productions people, ANYONE!... How can you print a book with errors like this one? It's not just wrong, it is simply unacceptable.

I started to learn English at high-school at the age of 12. I don't consider myself to be an genius or an A-student, but I never found this punctuation issue to be a problem. Yet I see people who are born into the English Language making this mistake every day; at work, in publications and even at schools. I just don't understand how kids are being taught these simple things. My own 10-year-old really impresses me when working out some maths problems pretty quickly, but she sometimes struggles with "Its" and "It's". I just don't understand why so many people get it wrong...

Maybe I care too much. But even if I ignore it, it does not go away. AAARGH!...