Tuesday, May 17, 2005

eats, shoots and leaves

i love steve gilliard's blog. really. i do. but this pisses me off:

"Wal Mart comes from a culture where there is no accountability for the rich. And it's corporate practices, largely taking place in rural America, were not under any real scrutiny. But as the company grows, the management hasn't grown into it's responsibilities to match it's size."

say it with me, people: pronominal possessive!! aargh! ITS!!

3 comments:

Nam LaMore said...

that drives me crazy when i see "its" and "it's" used improperly. however, my defense is that i am a non-english speaker. :-)

jp 吉平 said...

Ah, posessive pronouns!

my our
your you all'ziz; you guys's
her their
his
its

It's the word that goes in the blank:

Put it in _______ pants!.

People love the apostrophe-s posessive marker. I occasionally get students who don't get that there's no apostrophe-s posessive in Spanish or French.

Vamos a Juan's casa!

Anonymous said...

bugs the heck out of me, too..I oft wonder "where ARE those apostrophe police when you really need them???"

I also see it as an emblem of the watering/dumbing down of our collective language skills..Words are losing their meaning (everything is "awesome") and people tend to speak in clichés or familiar word couplings strung together and passed off as reasoned thoughts.

Some might argue that, hey..it's a fast-paced world and nobody has time for spelling and grammar anymore..you KNOW what they mean anyway.. Pfft it's just an apostrophe..one little tiny mark. It's not important.

Yeah..not important like that one little tiny bolt holding a jet engine to the wing of a large airplane carrying 300 people, right?

A-non