Smell This—It’s Awful!
I see a lot of grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in my job. Every once in a while, I see something really good, like the second “l” left out of “general public,” or substituting “nuisances” for “nuances” (use the spell checker, but don’t rely on it, kids).
Usually, though, it isn’t anything worth giggling about. For example, misuse of ”it’s” has spawned at least one book, and more debates than anyone probably wants to know about. The most common misuse that most of us see is using it in place of “its”. “Its” is a possessive singular pronoun, despite the lack of apostrophe. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is” and has nothing to do with the possessive form.
Today, an unnamed individual (not one of my writers), declared that there ought to be an apostrophe at the end—its’—because the “it” was plural and possessive. It’s not often that I get to see the birth of a new way to abuse punctuation, and this one gave me the same combination of amazement and dismay that I get when I find something that has been in the back of the fridge for way too long.
So, naturally, I had to share.
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July 8th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Its’ = its is? *shudder*
I had some confusion with its/it’s in my early school career, but once I realized “his/hers/its” made sense (and that you’d never try to make it “hi’s” even if the “her’s/it’s” part of it might not look COMPLETELY wrong), I never did again. And a few people I know who have had problems became clear on it once I pointed that out as well. Too bad more high school English teachers didn’t teach those types of trends/mnemonics.