There was an interesting story from the Livingston Enterprise last week about a middle school teacher who started the Apostrophe Protection Society of Southwest Montana. She contacts local businesses who are misusing apostrophes, either on their signs, mass mailings, advertisements or other forms, and attempts to get the mistake corrected.

Jennifer Smith has had moderate success. She said the biggest problem is people who use an apostrophe unnecessarily to make a word plural, as in "Menu's printed to order" instead of just "Menus."

Smith told the Enterprise reporter her fiance has to put his hand over her eyes every time they drive past a certain sign off I-90 that has an incorrect apostrophe or else she'll get all worked up over it. (Maybe someone can buy her a copy of Learning to Let Go as a wedding gift.)

My hat's off to her. She's fighting an uphill battle.

I think use of the English language has gone downhill for the past few decades. I first started to notice it in the '80s with the use of the word "like," as in "Like, the principal, he went up to Scott and said, like, if he didn't, like, stop doing that, he would, like, be arrested."

"Like," "um" and other similar words are called discourse particles, and linguists love to study them. Discourse particles are those words we accidentally insert into our conversations that, well, annoy linguists and other grammar police.

One linguist published a study last year in which she listened to hundreds of teenagers for several years — can you imagine the horror? — and she concluded that the use of "like" was actually an attempt to collect their thoughts, and to enhance their description of a situation. In other words, she said it improved their level of their conversation.

I, like, disagree.

I figured once I got out of high school I wouldn't have to listen to the word "like" being used in every other sentence. Boy, was I wrong.

It got to the point where I couldn't stand to be out on a date with a woman who used "like" all the time, even if she was beautiful and otherwise engaging.

I kept raising my standards. Then I started losing my hair, so I had to lower them again. Life is cruel like that.

Maybe I'll call that Livingston teacher and see if she has a sister who's single. She's probably really into quotation marks and semicolons. My kind of woman.