It's just not as important as it's made out to be

Funny how things come in groups, isn't it? Over at his blog, Josh Millard posted saying, in summary, "It's just a misplaced apostrophe. It's a mistake. We all know it. Now, for crap's sake, shut up about it."

A commenter said

this is an oasis in a pedantic dessert

it’s just a misplaced s

Impossible to tell how serious she was. But I'm going to answer, anyway. I did over there, but I'll spend some more time here.

Let me clarify: “desert” and “dessert” are both nouns. They fill the same syntactic role in a sentence. It’s plausible that one could come up with a sentence in which they could either one be used.

However, you’ll note they are pronounced differently as well, while its, it’s or your, you’re aren’t.

Now, it's interesting that she chose desert / dessert for her example, because one of my favorite badly-worded-headline examples is the New York Times' G.I.'s Deployed in Iraq Desert With Lots of American Stuff. In this case, desert and desert are not the same parts of speech - one's a noun, the other a verb - but in this particular sentence either one would work. The Times meant that they were stationed in the deserts of Iraq with lots of stuff in their possession, not that they were stationed in Iraq and had abandoned their posts taking lots of stuff with them; but either reading is possible. However, in speech there would be no confusion, just as with desert / dessert.

English is full of homophones - words that sound alike - and English spelling is full of homographs - words that are spelled the same. Rarely is any word both; the two systems, aural and visual, have different ways to distinguish words. Read - reed / read - red ... (Okay, so, as Barry points out, it depends on your definition of 'rare': there are a lot of common words that meet this criteria, but they still are a small percentage of the overall number of words in English. And most of his examples are highly unlikely to be confused, since most of them are not the same part of speech. Some are, it's true.)

The possessives and the contracted pronoun+be's are homophones in English (as are plural and possessive nouns (dog's, dogs, dogs')) ; it's handy to have a way to distinguish them in reading but when was the last time you got them confused in conversation?

Misspelling desert as dessert is more serious. Since they are both nouns, it's possible (not likely, of course) but possible to run across a sentence in which either is plausible. Just as it's possible to read a sentence and not know which tense read or - worse - put is in. We manage. We read the context and we figure it out. And that's with nouns and verbs, things that can fill the same slot in a sentence. [The same thing happens in speech (as in the Life on Mars episode where the dying man says "Quay" and they think he said "Key"), but few people get exercised about reforming English vocabulary - partly, I suppose, because usually we can ask the other person what they meant.]

If there really were sentences where either it is / you are or of it / of you could be used, then doubtless we’d have either different possessives or different contractions. As it is, you’re unlikely to be confused for more than a word or two - just as when you hear the sentence spoken - and that hardly even qualifies for garden-path status, let alone structural ambiguity.

Misplaced apostrophes are mistakes. Simple spelling mistakes, easily set right. They’re not worth the amount of time and emotion some people spend on them.

YMMV, and for lots of people it obviously does.