I thought it was courtin’ song. But your version sounds fun.
*If I get drunk
Well I know I’m gonna be
I’m gonna be the man who gets drunk till he pukes
And if I throw up
Well I know I’m gonna be
I’m gonna be the man who throws up on your shoes
I’m gonna be man who pukes all over you
And I would drink five hundred drinks
And I would drink five hundred more
Just to be the man who puked some stomach slime
And passed out on the floor*
I guess it’s not very romantic, though.
-VM
So what’s haver mean? I thought “haver”, in that song, meant throwing up. Am I confused here?
spingears, it’s distasteful for anyone to claim that they know better than anyone else how language “ought” to be used. But from you, there’s an added element of confusion since you’ve never seemed to show any particular care or mastery of the English language in your writing here on the forums.
So when people use “it’s” instead of “its” for the possessive form of “it” (as a great many, if not perhaps 98%, do), you feel they are not making a mistake, but in fact are helping to define a change in the language?
(I’m sorry if this comes across as argumentative - I’m asking because I’m genuinely curious.)
Mrs. Wilson, my 4th-grade English teacher, claimed to know better than I did how the english language ought to be used. And, though this was somewhat inconvenient for me, it really wasn’t very distasteful. It was also demonstrably true.
Funny you should ask, because some linguists (and I, too) believe that the apostrophe is indeed on the way out.
Of course, if I were still teaching, I’d still require my students to learn the difference. But I think the fact that I had to give them a mnemonic (“his and hers don’t have an apostrophe – neither does its if you’re using it as a possessive pronoun”) demonstrates how superfluous the apostrophe is.
I do wish that kids were taught some “old fashioned” grammar earlier on. Parsing sentences is useful, imho. When you have students in your class who’ve managed to graduate high school and get admitted to the largest university in the state without knowing to add -ed to a verb to make it past tense (happened more than once), lesson plans can get very difficult to execute, and you just start to despair in a way.
Before anybody accuses me of contradicting my earlier posts, please refer to this thread (I weigh in at post #41) and to my comments on a cite of Bill Cosby in post #28 this one.
Maybe I didn’t actually answer Xema’s question there.
They’re making a mistake if they omit the apostrophe in a document that uses a standard requiring it. I would not let any of my staff do it in anything they produce for publication. Our audience is very conservative and traditional, quite literally “old school”. (When our customers write to us, their letters are usually perfectly aligned and impeccably formatted, even when hand-written.) Omitting the apostrophe would give them the impression that we are sloppy and don’t know what we’re doing.
If they were to omit it in an email or a memo, I wouldn’t blink. They never do, though. Traditional standard usage is nearly reflexive for them.
But what I’m talking about is the overwhelming tendency to insert an apostrophe when it doesn’t belong.
Sure, you’ll occasionally see “Its time to eat.” But for every one of those, there are three thousand like “The groundhog saw it’s shadow.”
Really there Daydreamer,
When speaking in terms of such a fine line are the people around you such pricks that they have no better observations to make of your grammatical ability?
“Never under-estimate the ability of stupid people in large groups”
I say the “evolution” or “de-evolution” has thrown so much of the language I was instructed as a kid into the crapper that why try to make one part “educated” and then in the next sentence murder the language you were born with… it is a war out there… that is a mass, conscienceless slaughter of the English language. I would have to say that the majority of people living “here” whether by accident, ignorance or a merger of English with their native tongue routinely throw the grammatical rules in the trash-can banking on the fact things are so interpreted as it is why worry about it. Grammar anymore, in the adult world is for dinner parties and first impressions anyone else worried about such should better be paying me to dot my “i” s and cross my "t"s …
the rest of the answer ou seek has already been taken care of thoroughly here, so no need for additional input there…
Six of one, half dozen of the other. I’d say the same for both.
I do think we’re going to see the apostrophe disappear, but there’s no way to know what’s really going to happen, and it will certainly take a long time to vanish if it does.
But it only makes sense for people to write “it’s” as a possessive form of “it”. Why shouldn’t they? There’s really no need at all to distinguish between the possessive and the contraction for “it is”. I have never been able to conjure up a situation in which any real confusion is even possible.
The only reason we don’t open the floodgates, make it easier for everyone, eliminate the totally useless oddball rule, and put the dern apostrophe in there is because ( 
) if teachers and publishers did so, we’d have to deal with all the folks who’d be beating down our doors telling us that we’re making a mistake, promoting “bad English”, and contributing to the degradation of the language.
Which is all just nonsense. But dealing with nonsense takes time out of one’s day. (Or should I say “ones day”, so as not to cause confusion with the contraction for “one is” and make the construction harmonize with “his”, “hers”, “yours”, “ours”, and “its”?) <Not a swipe at you, Xema, just a joke>
In short, yes, I feel that people who spell the possessive form of “it” with an apostrophe are only making a mistake if they are doing so in a situation where that spelling is expressly or implicitly prohibited. Otherwise, what standard are we judging them against? Yours? Mine? Judith Martin’s?
I suppose it can be argued that it is also a “mistake” to use this spelling in any situation where doing so will cause an unfavorable or undesired outcome, but that’s a tactical rather than grammatical mistake.
Not unless the current tide of its rampant overuse is somehow reversed.
It took me a few seconds to come up with: “We will sell no wine before its time.” It could be argued that inserting the apostrophe doesn’t radically change the meaning here. But I’d suspect you won’t want to contend that subtle differences are meaningless - that would be a very slippery slope to get on.
It would be a tactical mistake caused by bad grammar. People who are out of the habit of making fine distinctions because they often don’t matter are unlikely to be able to make them when they do.
Ok, I want my Wayback Machine now, b/c this would have been the perfect example to use with my students!
“before its time” means “when the wine is ready”.
“before it’s time” means “before it is time to sell it”, which could mean anything.
Brilliant, and simple.
“Mr. Peabody!!!..”
<nitpick>Omitting the apostrophe isn’t a grammatical error; it’s a spelling error.</nitpick>
You and I essentially agree on this point. I am fully in favor of teaching kids standard edited English (or whatever it’s being called these days – I used to call it SAD in the classroom, for “standard academic dialect”).
My beef is with calling “it’s-for-its” an error per se.
There are many “errors”, in fact, that I make intentionally because I find the standard nonsensical. I usually write “til” rather than “till” as the short form of “until” – even in reports to my boss, not just memos. I place punctuation outside of end-quotes unless it is wedded to the material being cited, which means commas and periods almost always end up outside.
And I do believe that if most folks find the “its” form confusing and can’t keep it straight, ditch it.
As for the disappearance of the apostrophe, yes, the tide will have to turn. I think electronic communication will tip the scale. But if it happens, it won’t be in my lifetime b/c the canonical authorities are conservative and slow to change. However, as pop media continues to ascend, we may see things move faster. I see usage in reputable newspapers and magazines today that would never have gotten past an editor when I was in my 20s.
Would anyone argue that the apostrophe is entirely useless? It seems that it would have to be for it to totally disappear.
Er, this is drifting away from the OP, I think, but if I might add $0.02…
Like it or not, one of the things we use language for is to find out about who we’re talking to.
Er, one function of language is the discovery of characteristics of those with whom we’re communicating… Ah, to heck with that.
It’s just that we can learn things about our corespondents just by their choice of words, and by the care they take in using language. We get evidence about their, ah, social status, education, and maybe where they came from. (Sure, the written world of e-mail is a lot different than the spoken word of telephony, and a lot different that face-to-face conversation.)
I say our choice of words should depend on who we’re talking to, and how much we care about their good impression of us, if at all. Audience is everything.
“If one were to speak proper English, to whom would one speak it?”
You can tell the difference isn’t important if it’s not reflected in the pronunciation of the sentence. Surely your claim isn’t that such a sentence, spoken aloud, would seem ambiguous or incomprehensible to the listener? Besides, it’s clear that it couldn’t be “it’s” since that would constitute some sort of shift between registers that sounds incongruous and unnatural.
At any rate, the application of the term “grammar” to rules of orthography (i.e., writing) is a mistake because it conflates the natural and unavoidable “rules” of language with the artificial rules of writing. Grammar is a term for the rules that native speakers implicitly and unconsciously apply (no matter their education) when they speak, and the grammatical principles underpinning nonstandard dialects (ones in which “ain’t” or double negatives may be used, for example) are just as complicated and just as reflexive as the ones formally taught to students.
Writing, on the other hand, is not governed by a natural capacity of the brain, and its rules are in many ways completely independent of the rules that underlie the language it captures. Knowing how to properly use the apostrophe is important for any educated person, as is a mastery of Standard English in both spoken and written forms, since a person’s language usage is, regrettably or not, a tool used to judge them. (Note: the use of “them” as a gender-neutral third person pronoun is hundreds of years old, and William Shakespeare and Jane Austin are only two of the many great authors who have used the device in their writing.) However, that doesn’t mean that there is any inherent superiority to the “rules” of language as asserted by the fourth-grade teachers of the world. There is ample reason to learn them, but there is no justification for the reverence some people seem to have for them. Most of the rules we’re taught by our teachers don’t describe the language as it’s actually used, even in formal contexts, even by great writers, even hundreds of years ago. The long-standing disgust associated with preposition-stranding, for instance, comes out of a centuries-old misapplication of a grammatical rule of Latin (in which stranded prepositions were indeed impossible) to English. The rules regarding “split infinitives” result from the fact that Latin’s infinitives were single words, and thus simply could not be split. Naturally, the rules of Latin grammar are not valid tools for evaluating the English language - and yet these silly restrictions linger and are still taught to children.
One wonders how the English language managed to survive for hundreds of years without fourth-grade teachers to rap knuckles and click tongues. Shakespeare himself would have earned reprobation for his creative word-formation, inconsistent spellings, and the ending of sentences with prepositions. The average fourth-grade teacher who insists that “proper” English is the mark of civilization has either little familiarity with great literature or such a grandiose self-concept that she considers herself the superior of every great writer in the history of our language.
Fortunately, English (as with all languages) is not the fragile creature lying in a sick-bed that the fourth-grade teachers of the world seem to think it is. Not only did it survive and produce many of its sweetest fruits before their claw-like hands got a hold of it, but it will never be restrained by them; its evolution is not something that can be altered by all the dusty tomes and rulers-turned-weapons the opposing forces can muster.
Agreed - I was sort of “going with the flow” of the quote to which I was responding.
I do the same, and I’ve always been a bit curious how “till” has managed to become so prevalent. Is it sensible to make a contraction by chopping two letters off the front of a word, then adding a superfluous one to the end?
Amen, brother. The rule about moving the punctuation inside the quotation mark is a very strange one.
But it’s interesting that the distinction between “it’s” and “its” is about the closest thing to a perfectly regular rule that the english language has: if you mean “it is”, use “it’s”; in every other case, use “its”.
This could be taken to imply that it’s not possible for a spoken statement to be ambiguous. If so, put me down as skeptical.
Not incomprehensible, but ambiguous. “We will sell no wine before its time” and “We will sell no wine before it’s time” are both comprehensible sentences, but they have different meanings, as noted by SampleTheDog.
I would be reluctant to accept the principle that something incongruous or unnatural could not have been intended by the speaker (especially if the context is advertising, as it was for the quotation above).
It’s probably a mistake to assume that the primary goal of fourth-grade teachers is survival of the language. What they are principally concerned with is making their students adept in its use. Given the value of skill in the use of language - value upheld in essentially every human society of which we have record - this concern is a worthy one.
It’s been awhile since I read about this, so I don’t know the exact story, but “till” is the older word, and the original spelling. I prefer to spell it the standard way. Seems you’re doing a bit of picking and choosing of the rules here.
So “till” is older than “until” and thus not a contraction of it? That’s interesting, and would explain the apparent anomaly.
I’ll plead guilty. It would be hard to completely avoid this, given the immense number of rules (most with numerous exceptions) and the fact that some at least verge on contradiction.
Actually, as spoken there would be a difference between the two sentences, a difference that is indicated by the presence or absence of the apostrophe. The Orwellian pronunciation requires no apostrophe. However, if the intent is to claim that we will not sell wine before the time to sell it, (as indicated by the apostrophe), the word “time” would be spoken with a (very) slight rising pitch and small but noticeable extra emphasis. (In my Ohio-influenced, Southeast Michigan accent, I actually wind up including a slight glide in the word, so that taim comes out as tai:m, but only when I am saying that I will not sell wine before it is time.)
This is not to insist that the apostrophe always prevents ambiguity in spoken sentences or may not disappear from the language (thus increasing ambiguity for far future producers of near-future written plays), but only to note that the apostrophe does at this time in the given sentence provide a clue to pronunciation.