grocer's apostrophes live, but what about Gauss?

Saturday night I was driving younger daughter to a sleepover. I put on NPR and we heard someone reading a selection from a biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss as an 8-year old in school. Under threat of corporal punishment the teacher assigned the students to sum all the integers from 1 to 100. I commented to my daughter that was easy. I was thinking n * (n + 1) / 2, but with me driving the storyteller got to the answer before I did. Upon arrival at the sleepover we sat for a moment in the car listening to how the teacher handed Gauss the most advanced math text he owned, and the next day Gauss returned it, read, and comprehended. When I picked up younger daughter the next morning we discussed more about Gauss.

Today I encountered a search string from the http referrer logs (and that's a related but already flogged horse)

how+many+leap+year%27s+have+we+had+since+1975

or, stripped of the http-ism

how many leap year's have we had since 1975

Hmmm, the infamous grocer's apostrophe. Little surprise that it shows up within a query that is answered by trivial effort.

It's not the first time I've seen search strings like that. Alas for how common this sort of thing is. Alas for what that level of personal initiative portends.

Before I was born Asimov had already foreseen what might happen Someday.