Language evolves continuously, the apostrophe is dying and will be gone completely in fifty years or so. Why is it neccessary? Just because the arbitrary rules currently say it matters, you understand the words fine with or without it.


The only one that really annoys me is Americans saying "I could care less". Ugh, that kills me. It's "I couldn't care less". Think about it. It only makes sense that way round.

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Tee hee. Nice. The only thing that grinds my gears more than that, is the use of 'your' instead of 'you're'.



Argh. This... THIS... and Thrice THIS! It drives me up the wall. And, a load of people who write this, and then get it pointed out to them.. try to tell everyone that they are right! WTF?



Partly, this is true. Grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive. The rules should describe the way that people use the language, not force them to use it in an unnatural way. However, its the case of a death by a thousand cuts for a language. I agree that the use of an apostrophe isnt the end of the world. However, I have had to mark essays - and these are academic papers written by 18-22 year old students - who write like they text, and a lot of the emails that I get are almost indecipherable. There is a very short step from 'its' to 'm8'. These people will go out and apply for jobs, and they will write cover letters, and they will be judged on their ability to present themselves and mature and professional people.

No-one is perfect. Grammar is always slipping and we all make mistakes at times, but we do need to care about how we come across in the written form.

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Interesting, i don't know how Americans use "I could care less", but i use and hear this on a reasonalby regular basis with my friends and we do actually mean I could care less. For examples, if you are not overly disinterested in something, you could care less – you don't mind but do still have some interest, but it could be a lot less important to you than it is. It is different to and less extreme than "couldn't care less" in my localised experience.

edit, examples:
BBQ sauce on my pizza when i prefer mustard, but do like either – i could care less
Justin Bieber on TV – i couldn't care less

"I know, right", on the other hand, does tend to grate with me – not for grammatical reasons, it just annoys me. Only encountered it in face to face speech since the start of this term, I had not previously realised that this was something real people actually said outside of the internet and TV

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Last November I started help teach 1st and 2nd graders. That's an experiance. I have never been very good in the grammer department and yes I try to watch myself when I make post, but made notice how 'quirky the english language can be. When I'm on a forum and know there is people who's first language is not english, I tend to just gloss over most mistakes. I might have to reread a post four or five dozen times to make sense of it , but sometimes that's what required of us. I do tend to chuckle, but you try sometimes to read what a second or first grader writes!

Not necessarily, actually. If ignoring the rule slows down comprehension (and it can), and thus makes things less efficient, that's a pretty good reason to keep the rule. Especially considering the rule for 'its' isn't exactly complicated.

It improves clarity. The author's responsibility is not to offload the work of comprehension to the reader. It's to convey information clearly. That's why many grammatical rules are important (and why many are actively bad, to be fair).



The exact same argument applies. You know what they mean. Language evolves. Why worry about it?

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Are there clear misunderstandings that arise from an its/it's fail. I suspect this may be one reason the error is so common -- there's just not that much misunderstanding that can be generated.

"The Panda eats, shoots, and leaves" is a better example of a place where commas have consequences.

hahahahahaha!

In Germany we call this the "Deppenapostroph" (= idiots apostroph).

But there are many pet peeves i have with people misspelling.

Triology instead of Trilogy is one such thing..

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Not misunderstandings, necessarily. But little disruptions where people have to go back and reread something because their initial interpretation was incorrect. It would be like if I wrote an article about fractions and spelled 'half' as 'hlaf' every time. You'd know what I meant, but I think it would still slow down your reading of the text. Similar principle.

Plus, it's just such a mind-bendingly simple rule. "It's" is "it is", "its" is everything else. This isn't like dangling participles (something up with which I will happily put). It helps comprehension and clarity and requires minimal effort.

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Blood angles anybody? Not sure what those could be.
And heavy calvary must surely be where Jesus got crucified. Can't imagine it being light calvary.

To Colonel Kane:
Who's is a contraction of who is or, less commonly, who has.
Who's watching TV?
Do you know who's going to speak?
Who's ready to go?

Whose is the possessive of who or, somewhat controversially, which.
Whose book is this?
Do you know whose car this is?
I know a woman whose kids study there.

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One of my favourites.... Rouge Trader.... Clearly a 41st Millenium cosmetics door-to-door merchant, plying his trade across the galaxy!

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The death of the language is a symptom of the death of the culture. It's not indicative of the language evolving; it's the language decaying.

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