Lets Go

Old Navy, seeking to cash in on the start of another school year (meaning the start of another college football season), has created a new product line of licensed college and professional sportswear, “Superfan Nation.” One of the products in the line is a T-shirt with the logo and team name of one of dozens of schools and the words “Lets go!!” above. But as my grammar check suggests, there should be an apostrophe to indicate the contraction for the imperative “Let us go” as opposed to the verb indicating release, as in “The quarterback lets go of ball.” There’ve been rumblings in some quarters about how this is just one more indication of how no one knows anything anymore about grammar or punctuation or generally how to write good. Or even more generally about how our education system has let us down (let’s down?) and everything would be right in the world again if we just went back to phonics and cursive and dipping Susie’s pigtails in the inkwell. As a retired professor of college composition, I can’t get worked up about this corporate violation of our language. I see worse dozens of times every day just reading the newspapers (how many know the difference between “every day” and “everyday”?). Actually, I have less of a problem with the missing apostrophe than I have with the double exclamation points (they should only be used sparingly, only in dialogue, and only one at a time, please!!), though considering the sporting context, I could accept one. But then the exclamation point is an end point, indicating the end of a sentence, thereby making the capital “G” in “Go” a spelling error. Old Navy is offering to replace the faulty T-shirts and are reprinting them with an apostrophe. But I would suggest they go the next step (let’s go the next step) and fully correct the locution: “Let’s go!” (With the quote marks.)