# "its" v. "it's" **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [March 13, 2015, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918 "2015-03-13T16:29:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/41 "2015-03-15T16:22:22Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > So you’re saying it’s a mute point. Or possibly “Its a moot point”, depending on how much of a grammar outlaw you are. ---
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/42 "2015-03-15T16:55:47Z")
> [@HeXen](#): > > …grammar nazi’s… Can’t figure out if you’re a master of irony, or if my jackboots are rubbing weird again… ---
**Author:** ![Doug\_K](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5ac83/32.png) [@Doug\_K](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_K)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/43 "2015-03-15T17:07:03Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Unless you’ve been contracted to write the script for a new Addams family movie how often do you use the possessive form of it? That would be Itt’s. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/44 "2015-03-15T18:55:15Z")
Something to remember: NONE of the possessive pronouns get an apostrophe. (my, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, its, our, ours, their, theirs, whose). The ONLY time “it’s” is used is when replacing “it is”. ---
**Author:** ![FXMastermind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fxmastermind/32/7289_2.png) [@FXMastermind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FXMastermind)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/45 "2015-03-15T19:09:01Z")
It’s come to my attention that you may have forgotten something ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/46 "2015-03-15T19:29:50Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > Or possibly “Its a moot point”, depending on how much of a grammar outlaw you are. Or even possibly a whoosh. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/47 "2015-03-15T19:35:45Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > Fairly frequently. It’s handy for describing the attributes of an inanimate object. If I’m discussing my house, I can say that its roof is 25 years old and it may be time for a new one, and it would be nice if its living room were a little bigger. I was talking about the possessive form of it rather than the possessive pronoun its. ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/48 "2015-03-15T19:55:16Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > Or possibly “Its a moot point”, depending on how much of a grammar outlaw you are. > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Or even possibly a whoosh. Note the possessive. And the sound. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/49 "2015-03-15T20:39:12Z")
[Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe_(')). ---
**Author:** ![gigi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a587f6/32.png) [@gigi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gigi)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2015, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/50 "2015-03-16T22:17:25Z")
> [@marshmallow](#): > > Irregardless, for all intensive purposes my friends and myself could care less if we flaunt some stupid rules alot. Youve honed in on what really matter’s. ---
**Author:** ![HeXen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c89c15/32.png) [@HeXen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeXen)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2015, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/51 "2015-03-16T23:15:29Z")
> [@xenophon41](#): > > You’re right. Your post just induced, at least for this reader, slight but definitely significant feelings of sadness and nausea. I may have even winced once or twice. > > To think, even though I’m an experienced and -dare I say?- accomplished grammar nazi, all it took was one insulting and awkwardly written little note to have forced me into a belief that you are an idiot. Oh, to again have the control you’ve so rudely wrested from me! Alas, I yield to your communicative mastery… You’re not quite too well accomplished because you missed a few things I did on purpose , including the obvious misspelling of that particular word. Truth hurts though apparently. It certainly at least was able to bring you down to the level of petty insults. I’m certainly far from perfect in most everything including proper use of grammar but I certainly made out quite well for myself in life and achieved all my goals up to this point so I hardly think anyone’s opinion of my intelligence has any merit. Now if you think that everyone’s misspellings are the actual result of ignorance or something else instead of my opinion of it being the result of careless mistakes, force of keyboarding habit…etc then why don’t you just say so? ---
**Author:** ![xenophon41](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xenophon41/32/253_2.png) [@xenophon41](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xenophon41)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2015, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/52 "2015-03-17T02:06:49Z")
> [@HeXen](#): > > You’re not quite too well accomplished because you missed a few things I did on purpose , including the obvious misspelling of that particular word. Well, I didn’t critique your post, sir or ma’am; I _responded_ to it. And yes, the obvious misspelling was obvious, as it’s been in the roughly 80% of posts in this thread that have manipulated contractions, plurals and possessives in deliberately faulty ways. > [@](#): > > Truth hurts though apparently. It certainly at least was able to bring you down to the level of petty insults. Yes, I can tell that I hurt your feelings, and that’s regrettable. But you’re not doing much to dispel my impression. While this post was not condescending in the same was as your previous, it was just as awkward, and misses the point regarding written communication by an equally wide margin. > [@](#): > > Now if you think that everyone’s misspellings are the actual result of ignorance or something else instead of my opinion of it being the result of careless mistakes, force of keyboarding habit…etc then why don’t you just say so? See, this is the sort of clumsy structure I’m referring to when I say that your posts “force me” to consider you -or at least your muddied thinking- idiotic. You present a disagreement between us (one that you’ve unilaterally manufactured, as I’ve not had this argument with you) in a categorical manner, yet you’ve broadened both of the positions outside of their presumed categories by including weasel words: you’ve assigned me the position that “everyone’s” textual errors are purely the result of ignorance, and stated your own opinion that all such errors are due only to careless or clumsy keyboarding. But, perhaps realizing that such absolutes are inherently unsupportable, you give me “or something else” as a possible cause, and you complete your own short list of causes with an irresolute “etc.” So the argument as you’ve presented it becomes absolutely meaningless from both sides, and yet you finish with a demand that I just say what my position is in clear terms! Idiotic. Whether you personally feel that grammar, syntax and orthography are important in clear communication isn’t the point. Communication doesn’t happen unless both sender and receiver are working from the same set of rules. However you’ve arranged your thoughts and encoded them into text, I have to be able to decode that text in order to grasp whatever it is you’re trying to tell me. And if you’re throwing out some of the rules of the language, some of your meaning is likely to be lost in transmission. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2015, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/53 "2015-03-17T02:45:27Z")
> [@xenophon41](#): > > . . . Communication doesn’t happen unless both sender and receiver are working from the same set of rules. . . . What I find fascinating is how very loose, fluid, and screwy those rules – almost “meta-rules” – can be. For instance, any number of times, someone sitting by me has said something that was wrong, but which I could translate, in my mind, to what my companion clearly meant. “Boston is under a real blizzard. It’s just terrible there in Missouri.” I know he really meant “Massachusetts,” but his tangue got tongled. Happens to us all. The “rules” failed, but there was communication anyway, because we can (sometimes) reach out past them and connect with one another. ---
**Author:** ![Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/try2b_comprehensive/32/65_2.png) [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Try2B_Comprehensive)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2015, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/54 "2015-03-17T04:45:17Z")
It’s even easier if we all become mind readers. It cuts out this pesky ‘language’ altogether. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2015, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/55 "2015-03-17T04:51:06Z")
We could just go with body language, gestures, and the occasional thrown punch. Getting punched in the nose is remarkably free from contextual ambiguity. ---
**Author:** ![Kenm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bc79bd/32.png) [@Kenm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kenm)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2015, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/56 "2015-03-17T05:12:48Z")
I thought the ancient Greeks had a thing for Apostrophe and Persephone. ---
**Author:** ![xenophon41](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xenophon41/32/253_2.png) [@xenophon41](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xenophon41)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2015, 10:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/57 "2015-03-17T10:32:43Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > What I find fascinating is how very loose, fluid, and screwy those rules – almost “meta-rules” – can be. For instance, any number of times, someone sitting by me has said something that was wrong, but which I could translate, in my mind, to what my companion clearly meant. > > “Boston is under a real blizzard. It’s just terrible there in Missouri.” > I know he really meant “Massachusetts,” but his tangue got tongled. Happens to us all. The “rules” failed, but there was communication anyway, because we can (sometimes) reach out past them and connect with one another. Oh yeah, the essential meaning generally gets through. But if that had been an email exchange, you might have scratched your head wondering if he was trying to introduce a second geographical region into his weather commentary, or if it truly was a MO/MA brain fart. And if it had been a blog post (or message board post) even more so, particularly if you’d never met the person. If it had been said in a published article you would be even less likely to casually accept the error (I presume; I don’t know you that well). Because the textual stuff doesn’t have those gestures and body postures (and nose punches) that are available in a more intimate context. Damn, I’m a stick in the mud. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2015, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/58 "2015-03-17T17:32:50Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I was talking about the possessive form of it rather than the possessive pronoun its. OK, I see now. My bad. But can’t forget IT from _A Wrinkle in Time_. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2015, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918/59 "2015-03-17T20:18:21Z")
> [@xenophon41](#): > > Oh yeah, the essential meaning generally gets through. But if that had been an email exchange, you might have scratched your head wondering if he was trying to introduce a second geographical region into his weather commentary, or if it truly was a MO/MA brain fart. And if it had been a blog post (or message board post) even more so, particularly if you’d never met the person. If it had been said in a published article you would be even less likely to casually accept the error (I presume; I don’t know you that well). > > Because the textual stuff doesn’t have those gestures and body postures (and nose punches) that are available in a more intimate context. > > Damn, I’m a stick in the mud. Not at all. (Grin: I’m waving aside your closing self deprecation; in fact, I quite agree with everything else you said!) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-v-its/714918.md?page=2)