Apostrophe abuse is mushrooming I AM sorry to disabuse M Robinson of her interpretive error (Letters, January 8) but the meaning of both examples of the sentence relating to the freed cat Coco in her letter is absolutely identical.

I sometimes used to help my pupils to understand the correct use of the apostrophe by giving the example of o’clock. In this case the omission of letters was indicated i.e. the ‘f ’. So it could help them understand that the apostrophe sometime indicates ‘of the’ or belonging/ possession. The 14-week-old cat’s owner literally means the owner of the 14-week-old cat.

I wish the abuse of the apostrophe, which has mushroomed from the greengrocer’s error, beyond the restaurant menu mistake, to the predictive text disaster, had the power to make me smile.

Dorothy Nicholson, Grange Garth, York