h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the Petty Hates conversation Lucky Star mentioned the following:


> [I hate]..."it's" being used grammatically
> incorrectly to mean "belonging to it".

> I had to write out 100 times at
> school "i-t-apostrophe-s can only mean
> it is" so I don't see why everyone else can't
> get it right


So why can 'it' not have a possessive apostrophe? Something i've always wondered.

And why isn't always spelled allways.

The possessive doesn't need an apostrophe because there is no letter elided. "John's" is short for "John his"

Don't ask me about "Mary's".

The spelling of English is slightly logical and largely a matter of convention.

So it's always right to spell all ways always and always wrong to spell all right alright.

And yet it changes. But it's all right, that's its prerogative.

"John his"? Are you sure? If so surely Its is short for "It his"

If enough people use the apostrophe then I suppose it could become the norm. But by that reasoning then textspeak could end up becoming the norm.

I'm pretty sure the actual reason why "its" is "correct" is that it's equivalent to "his" and "her", not to "John's" or "Jane's". Those don't need apostrophes, so why should "its".


I'd not heard the "John his" explanation before - I always suspected it was because there was an 'e' missing from the original German version (modern German uses "des Mannes" for "the man's", for isntance). It's called the genitive case, and boy did I hate having to remember case rules for my A level!

Personally, I'm no great fan of "prescriptive grammar", where there's a "right" version of the language - it seems weird to have a language, analyse it, and then decide that half of it doesn't fit the rules for itself. But I suppose for non-ambiguity's sake, it's useful to have a "standard" version...

Oh, and if that was the line you had to write, I'd disagree - "it's" is also used for "it has" - e.g. "it's been used a lot"

Its would not be 'it his', but its, on a level with his and hers. The door's handle would be the door, its handle. Though of course it need not have been like that; there is possibly no good answer.

John his . . . I suppose I'm thinking of the great hit of Shakespeare's time, 'Captain Digorie Piper, His Galliard'. Stands to reason. Dangerous way to approach language, rationality, I suppose . . . Jonathan Swift poked fun at the fad for etymology in his time by deriving 'goat' from 'go at' -- a goat is an animal that will go at you -- and 'ostler' from 'oats stealer'.

Lewis Carroll and Bernard Shaw were hot on correctness of spelling; Carroll would write wo'n't to show where wltters were left out; Shaw thought elision-apostrophes were so much lumber and wrote wont, cant and dont. Didnt catch on. I dont say it wont someday though.

he did it "to show where wltters were left out", did he?

my favourite is the Churchill quote about ending sentences with a preposition:
"[banning it is] arrant nonsense up with which I will not put"

Some people don't seem to realise that language HAS evolved and WILL evolve and should go on evolving. They think all the rules of grammar and spelling are set in stone.

It's strange to hear someone say a word only to say "does that word exist?". All words have been created at some time so why not create a new one there and then?

That's a perfunstory idea.

Actually, the posessive "its" is a relic of an outmoded case system. (I love being able to use a phrase like that!) Basically, English used to have lots of endings that marked case and then gave them up except for pronouns, so they're just weird and could well go away eventually.

But if anyone here is a fan of Strong Bad Email (http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail89.html, last week's episode had a lovely song on this very topic. It went something like "If you want it to be possesive, it's just I T S, but if you want to make a contraction it's I T apostrophe S. Scalawag"