March 4th

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

I tought it was the difference between helping your uncle Jack of a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse .

No, that is the need to differntiate between majuscule and minuscule.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

No, that is the need to differntiate between majuscule and minuscule.

I wanna skip scule.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by patrickt

In all seriousness, when my son's English teacher told him grammar wasn't important I had to demonstrate it's importance and explain to him how abstract thought requires clear and accurate speech. If you can't speak and write clearly, you can't think clearly.

Surely that should include knowing the difference between "it's" (an abbreviation for "it is", or sometimes "it has") and "its" (meaning "belonging to it") shouldn't it?

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Surely that should include knowing the difference between "it's" (an abbreviation for "it is", or sometimes "it has") and "its" (meaning "belonging to it") shouldn't it?

Damn, someone made a mistake on the Internet!

[Phogg]

Grammar got runned over by a train, dear...

[Mostly Math]

Who cares about grammar. March 4 is important only because it is my birthday!!!

[JD Gumby]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Surely that should include knowing the difference between "it's" (an abbreviation for "it is", or sometimes "it has") and "its" (meaning "belonging to it") shouldn't it?

Gotta love English grammar and its "rules," especially given that almost all other possessives not ending in "s" I know of ("their" being the only exception?) use the "'s" construct. It's not too surprising that it mixes up a lot of people.

[ElsieC]

Originally Posted by Mostly Math

Who cares about grammar. March 4 is important only because it is my birthday!!!

Happy Birthday!

[carpetmojo]

"It has " as "it's" - allowing for the possiblity that I've forgotten the fact if I was ever taught it, all those eons ago - that's a new one to me, Harry.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by patrickt

In all seriousness, when my son's English teacher told him grammar wasn't important I had to demonstrate it's importance and explain to him how abstract thought requires clear and accurate speech. If you can't speak and write clearly, you can't think clearly.

Originally Posted by HarryT

Surely that should include knowing the difference between "it's" (an abbreviation for "it is", or sometimes "it has") and "its" (meaning "belonging to it") shouldn't it?

You see, that's what you get when your English teacher tells you that grammar isn't important... And personally, I'd fire that teacher. Why else teach English? Grammar is the base you need to have, before you can actually learn the language. The vocabulary will come with reading books and looking words up in a dictionary.

Originally Posted by Mostly Math

Who cares about grammar. March 4 is important only because it is my birthday!!!

Happy (belated) birthday to you!


And I think you should all learn how to talk Dunglish...

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by JD Gumby

Gotta love English grammar and its "rules," especially given that almost all other possessives not ending in "s" I know of ("their" being the only exception?) use the "'s" construct. It's not too surprising that it mixes up a lot of people.

That's not grammar, it's spelling. Grammar develops organically in all languages and is the structure the speakers put words into to create meaning. Native speakers don't have to learn their language's grammar to speak it.

Spelling is a man-made way of representing words by using symbols. The symbols and other conventions are completely arbitrary, although one hopes for a certain amount of consistency in the application. (I.e., there's no reason that the symbol for "A" should be "A"; that's arbitrary. However, once that symbol has been chosen, it's best if it is used consistently for the "A" sound).

While I agree that one needs to learn that the word pronounced /its/ is spelled "it's" if it is a contraction and "it's" if it is a possessive, I wish that the people who settled on that rule had been paying more attention because it's a stupid rule. The usual way for indicating possession in English (in Germanic languages generally) is to add an /s/ sound to the end of the word doing the possessing. The conventional way of writing this in English is to use an apostrophe before the s.

But while the general rule is that we form the possessive by adding "'s" to the word, for whatever reason a few people decided that the way to show the possessive of "it" is to add an "s" without an apostrophe. And to make matters worse, there *is* a form of "it" that does use an apostrophe...but it's not the possessive. So - normal rule - use 's to indicate the possessive. "It" rule - use 's when you *don't* want the possessive, and use s-with-no-apostrophe with you *do* want the possessive. It's a dumb rule. (Doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it is dumb).

And there is no reason the convention couldn't have been to use "it's" for both words. There is no danger of confusion because that's the rule we use for regular nouns: "Tony's going to be late for dinner" or "Tony's dinner is late" are perfectly clear despite the use of the apostrophe in both cases. I can't think of any situation in which there would be confusion, in fact. Which shouldn't be surprising, really, since when we speak we don't pronounce the apostrophe anyway. We just say /its/ and people know what we mean.

But that train has left the station, so it's best to just follow the rules as laid down by our fathers and our father's fathers. And maybe our fathers' fathers. And not get into the even-more-fraught area of spelling generally.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

"It has " as "it's" - allowing for the possiblity that I've forgotten the fact if I was ever taught it, all those eons ago - that's a new one to me, Harry.

"It's been raining", "it's been good seeing you", etc. Certainly not as common as "it is", but not uncommon either.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

But while the general rule is that we form the possessive by adding "'s" to the word, for whatever reason a few people decided that the way to show the possessive of "it" is to add an "s" without an apostrophe.

It's consistent in that it applies to ALL the personal pronouns: his, hers, theirs, ours, yours, its. None of them use an apostrophe.

[nogle]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's consistent in that it applies to ALL the personal pronouns: his, hers, theirs, ours, yours, its. None of them use an apostrophe.

For clarity, is it 'Is' or 'mes' for first person singular? :-)

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by nogle

For clarity, is it 'Is' or 'mes' for first person singular? :-)

Mes is first person plural
Yous is second person plural
Theys is third person plural