Coca-Cola Only Wants to Save One Polar Bear Home

Those of you who think that Coca-Cola is being really generous by helping out the polar bears might want to take a look at their bottle of Coke. According to the 2-liter bottle of Coke that my husband picked up for me, they only want to save the home of ONE polar bear.

That’s right, they only want to save ONE polar bear. If you notice, my Coke bottle says “Protect the Polar Bear’s Home”. Anybody who has taken a third grade English class knows that if you want to indicate the homes of PLURAL bears, you would write “bears’ “, with the apostrophe on the end. As a homeschool teacher, I know that you teach this in third grade English class, because I taught it to my daughter last year.

In most cases, I wouldn’t bother to point out a simple grammatical mistake like this. When someone makes a grammatical error on their blog, a message board post, or in a small business situation, I can sympathize – we all make grammatical mistakes once in a while. When a larger publication, like the New York Times or some book publishing house, allows a grammatical mistake to slip by them, I shake my head, wondering how they could let the mistake pass the grammar checkers.

However, I really wonder how a mistake like this could end up going through the checks of a BILLION dollar corporation. Coca-Cola’s packaging more than likely goes through focus groups before it hits our store shelves. A lot of people look at it before it leaves the factory, yet nobody noticed this mistake? It really makes me fear for the future of the English language and for the education of our country.