i refuse to follow the rules that exist in conventional english grammar regarding its/it's, as it demonstrates rather clearly how grammar is in fact a form of mind control. it clearly follows that weird al is an nwo pawn, btw.
but, let us analyze this carefully. we have three things to take into account.
1) contractions. it's can clearly be used as a contraction for "it is". no argument.
2) plural. generally, when used without an apostrophe, an s at the end of a word means that the idea expressed is one of plurality.
3) possessive. generally, we use apostrophes to indicate possessives.
it follows that, to be consistent across the language, its should mean plural and it's should be used for both the contraction and the possessive. yet, for absolutely no discernible reason other than the arbitrary dictate of some centralized grammar authority somewhere, this convention is shattered for it's/its. i don't know the history, but it almost certainly reduces to somebody's arbitrary opinion on the matter.
i reject all of this as inconsistent with the principles of natural justice, which demand that laws be on a firm, rational basis rather than at the arbitrary dictate of some authoritarian body. with enough push back, we can take back our language as a democratic, dynamic entity and have this changed to something more rational.
so, please join in me in ignoring the irrationality of this particular rule of modern english - and any others you may find.
Luke
What do you have against koalas?
deathtokoalas
it's the cuteness. puts me into a rage just thinking about it...
Mario
whether or not you're being a troll, you make a rather interesting claim. You must be the life of the party, too. Haha take care.
deathtokoalas
well, in some sense, i'm drawing from orwell. but, you don't really need to draw on fiction. you can look at the development of french. the history of repression that has gone into french is very deep and well documented. most people that today speak "proper french" previously spoke a different dialect of latin, such as occitan. these dialects have been viciously repressed through forced schooling in a manner that is every bit as heavy-handed as the forced anglicization of natives in australia and canada. the development of france as a nation-state is inherently connected to the standardization of french as a language.
if you analyze french, you'll immediately realize how ridiculously constructed it is. the gendering is really quite ridiculous, and consider how much deference it provides to authority (specifying between the tu and the vous seems entirely arbitrary, until you realize it's meant to enforce a hierarchy).
linguists will tell you that language is really at the core of how we think. how many philosophical debates reduce to the meaning of a term? and, there's good reason for this, as it's at the core of how we grasp concepts. if the centralized grammar authorities (dare i say grammar nazis) can get you to think in a way that upholds hierarchy and defers you to authority, they're a good ways towards getting you to behave in the way they want.
it's/its may be trivial in that context, and english is not nearly as controlled as french is. but, it's a good place to start in deconstructing the conditioning and questioning the ideas underlying the grammatical rules.
a better example in english is capitalization.
stop and think about what they teach kids in schools. whenever you capitalize a proper name, you're enforcing a hierarchical relationship between people. when a child writes "the president", it's marked as incorrect. it must be The President. for the rest of your life, you will write The President, The Prime Minister, The CEO, etc.
this is so engrained it's not even thought about. but it's a means of enforcing a social order.
Mario Venegas
holy shit. I wish I had that much time on my hands. Well, TIL. Thanks for that wall of awesome information. That's pretty rad stuff. What do you do for a living, if I may ask? You seem very knowledgeable. I apologize in advance, English isn't my first language.
deathtokoalas
let's just say i'm a musician. you can hear my music by clicking my name.
lsm234
You rage against the machine, bro!
deathtokoalas
i'd advise building parallel structures, instead. far more productive.
(evil laugh)
J.D.
Look out we have a rebel here! Mwahaha that was a fragment! that will show the establishment!
deathtokoalas
nonono, rebels necessarily acknowledge the existence of the state and flail hopelessly against it. post-leftists are trying not to do that any more, because there's a recognition that it's just a waste of time. it's a bit elitist, but it's really more realistic. one of the problems is that we don't breed in the first place, so this whole idea of building for future generations is really just empty liberal rhetoric. the focus needs to be on the now. and that's actually getting back to roots; it's a forgotten central aspect of marxism that workers can only live for the present if they stop living for the afterlife. so, the new anti-establishmentarianism rejects rebellion in favour of creative building. there's not much hope that it's going to create systemic change, but it at least allows us to get a feeling of freedom while we're actually still alive. leave the rebellion for the terrorists. gimme an art commune in the mountains, and put your guns away...
Amy
I think you lost 80% of your audience when you started using multi-syllabic words. Great diatribe, though :)
Chris
Have you heard of Weird Al's parody of "Royals" by Lorde called "Foil". He actually talks about the illuminati and consperacies and what not. Weird Al is not a mastermind of evil, he is a mastermind of parody. And I started to listen to your so called "music" before I had to turn in off because of the LITERAL irritaion it brings to my brain. If you want to become a successful muscian, try less scratching on the chalkboard and more actual musical instruments, like say a piano. I would abadon your music career and go into writing. You are obviusly a better writer than a muscian.
deathtokoalas
there's plenty of pianos in there, but i'm actually a guitarist. there's a few poems, too. i mean, there's 70 some songs up. try the "recent" playlist a few lines down.
that song i have up is a bit of a joke, but it's necessary for another week because i'm putting the songs up in the same order and length as i wrote them, meaning they'll consistently be staggered by about 18.5 years. i'll have you know i was 15 when i jammed that out in 1996. it was my first demo tape....
....and if you appreciate it for what it is, it pulls it off well. but it's not for everyone, admittedly.
Monotremata
the subterranean tremor that being currently engineered is language mash-up : spanglish, frenglish, sprench, germalian, bulgarese, etc. Cityspeak and Newspeak will merge with these into an 'idiomatic singularity' - the corridors of power speaking in code, separating the rulers from the ruled. Doubleplusgut! \m/
rejectfairytales
While I share your view that there is much in thoughtlessly spoken language that ought to be opposed I think you've made a poor choice in railing against non-use of the apostrophe in this case. If anything I think we should use apostrophes less. I agree with the trend toward using a lone s or es for plurals, eliminating nonstandard plurals eg: plural of squid should be squids not squid ; plural of octopus should be octopuses not octipodes. Just this would make English a lot simpler, which I think is important because as +jnrclerk points out, language is NOT the be all and end all. Meaning is so much more important so the more we can eliminate arbitrary rules the better.
In terms of improving society I think encouraging brevity would be the best cause. Just think of all the empty verbiage floating around especially in legislative documents, legal documents, and the procedural documents of many companies. I find that most people who use too many words have a similar thing to hide - they are talking bullshit! Of course that isn't always the case but it often is. Leave the koalas alone - I'm just sayin!
deathtokoalas
yeah, the meaning > procedure thing is really the crux of a lot of my grammar anti-authoritarianism. language is spoken first and foremost. writing is important, it's importance cannot be understated, but the purpose of writing something down is to get a meaning across.
i've put it down to focus purely on recording right now, but i've been reading a bit of archaic political literature lately by the likes of richard price and thomas hobbes (the aim is to get in between the historical debate over the french revolution that happened between thomas paine and edmund burke). it's impossible not to notice that the spelling and grammar used in texts before 1900, and especially before 1800, is dramatically different than spelling and grammar used today. yet, when i'm having trouble following something, it has more to do with attitudes that have changed than the difference in writing conventions. that's to say nothing of shakespeare or chaucer who were legitimately writing in a different language. yet, if you let a grammar authoritarian loose on these texts, the result would be ugly. with hobbes, it's just missing the point that language is constantly evolving; with shakespeare, it actually diminishes the artistic expression.
and, it's worthwhile to wonder what somebody will think of reading this very youtube comment in the year 2200, if youtube is still online that far into the future. i'd normally say something like "if we avoid blowing ourselves up", but i suspect that if we do blow ourselves up the internet will keep running without us for quite some time into the future. web pages written in archaic language could be an interesting phenomenon in the not so distant future.
somebody pointed out that this whole thread is sort of funny because my grammar is actually almost spotless. well, most of the rules make sense. i want to go back to the idea of reason being the guiding force, rather than convention. language will shift, but reason will stay mostly static. if we focus on reason rather than convention, we will provide future generations the ability to disassemble our archaic writing; if we focus on convention over reason, we run the risk of becoming incoherent to future audiences.
akkinex
It's is the conjugated form of both 'it is' and 'it has.' FYI
Oh, and this might help to explain why the apostrophe for the possessive 'its' was dropped a couple hundred years ago. From http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp
From what we understand, the possessive was also written it’s until a couple of hundred years ago. While we don’t know for certain, it is possible that the apostrophe was dropped in order to parallel possessive personal pronouns like hers, theirs, yours, ours, etc.”
deathtokoalas
hrmmmn. thanks for that.
i've deleted about a dozen posts explaining that the rule applies because "it" is a "personal pronoun". the people posting thought they were smart, but it's actually a really dumb response that i didn't want to get into. i didn't know that it's was an Officially Correct possessive in the past; in light of that information, your post has made me reconsider.
rather than focus on pronouns, let's look at a concept called a "possessive determiner". consider the following:
this is our house / the house is ours.
that is their house / the house is theirs.
this is your house / the house is yours.
that is her house / the house is hers.
this is it's house / the house is it's.
(it may be a cat, for example)
in each case, the first phrase is using what you may mistake as a pronoun as a "possessive determiner". the second phrase is the possessive pronoun. the s in each case is not due to possession, but due to it being a pronoun rather than an adjective.
wikipedia (i don't have time to go to the library, sorry) lists possessive determiners in english as:
1) my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose
2) the saxon genitives formed from other nouns, pronouns and noun phrases (one's, everybody's, Mary's, a boy's, the man we saw yesterday's).
you can clearly see from this that its is used in exactly the same way as a general noun possessive is. yet, it inconceivably isn't written that way.
ok.
i had to triple check that and rewrote it a few times, not being somebody that cares a lot about grammar. the only reason my grammar doesn't suck is because i spent my entire childhood in my room reading and i picked it all up through intuition. it's just about what looks right.
but i'm done now. the personal pronoun thing is not correct. so, please stop posting it. i will block you!
John
The current iteration of
Oh come on! Why did that have to be a short cut for strikethrough?! -_-
deathtokoalas
you can get italics by surrounding the word with _. you can bold by surrounding the word with *.
_ italic _ . without the spaces: italic.
i've always understood the difference as being an attempt to separate the meanings in the way you've provided. but, there's virtually no chance anybody is going to get confused. with all the homonyms out there, confusing the contraction with the possessive should be the least of anybody's concerns...
Unofficial winner
It makes us look professional.
deathtokoalas
please. most professionals can barely spell their own names.
it makes you look like a social outcast, or an english professor that can't find a real job.
i was in school a long time. math. physics. programming. law. music. a few other things. i'll admit it was very surprising to me the first time i realized the guy in front of me, who has a phd in an incredibly abstract topic and dozens of published papers, was not able to get his homophones straight. it was just like...
"did he just write there on the board when he meant their? i thought this was a university. give me my money back..."
....but it's so overwhelmingly common in the university classroom that you eventually get used to it.
professionals are interested in the thing(s) that they're studying. you'll run across the odd one that is particular about the grammar, but for the most part they simply don't care.
you've just been lied to by your high school teachers. the truth is nobody cares about your grammar or is going to judge you based on it.
it's not the only thing they lied to you about, either.
"i know she just built a usable prototype for a quantum computer, but she didn't capitalize her proper place names, so how can we hire her?"
it doesn't happen.
people will judge you on your work.