Hi, grandma girl, I was just wondering if you could touch on your Y-O-U-R and your Y-O-U-A-Past-F-E-R-E.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't see this grandma mistakes, thanks a lot.

Katie called in a while ago, but recently Bill Mills made me aware of a weird ad campaign

that seems to misuse the word Y-O-R, so I decided it was a good time to tackle this topic.

First, I think people get these two words mixed up for a simple reason.

They sound the same. You just have to remember the difference.

Your Y-O-U-R is the possessive form of U.

Does this belong to you? Is this your strangely worded ad campaign?

Your Y-O-U-R.

Your Y-O-U-A-Past-F-E-R-E is a contraction of two words, U-R.

Remember that an apostrophe can stand in for missing letters, and in this case it stands in for the missing letter A.

It doesn't save much space, but it does change the phrase from two syllables, U-R, to one syllable, U-R,

so I guess it serves an honorable purpose.

You're the best listeners ever, U-R. Why O-U-A-Past-F-E-R-E?

Now that we have that squared away, you won't believe the ad campaign Bill pointed out to me.

The company is C-Gate, and the new tagline for one of its products is U-R-On,

but not U-R-On-Y-O-U-A-Past-F-E-R-E, as you would expect, but rather U-R-On-Y-O-U-R possessive-On.

I have a screenshot at my website, so you can see that I'm not making this up.

Bill thought it was a typo, but I've worked in marketing before, and I know how many people have to sign off on something like this.

So I figured the marketers must be trying to do something funky, such as make the word ON a noun.

As in, here, I have this ON thing for you. Wow, thanks, I've always wanted an ON.

Not wanting to unfairly malign C-Gate, I asked them what they were thinking, and someone named Forest Monroy was kind enough to reply.

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