This is almost always a mistake in muscle memory error than the author literally not understanding "its" vs "it's".

It's a typo. The author goes on to use "its" correctly the rest of the post.

As a grammar nazi myself, being a typo nazi annoys me. It's as useful to the discussion as getting on your case for using the U+2019 quotation mark instead of an apostrophe in your contraction of "they’re" and "it’s" in your comment.

I think that the mistake is common because it is triggered by a language irregularity. Normally in English, 's indicates a possessive. By that logic, something that belongs to "it" should be "it's", just as something that belongs to John is "John's". But no, we spell the possessive pronoun "its".

And I've often seen autocorrect try to turn a correct "its" into an incorrect "it's" or vice versa.

Sure, I can see why people mess it up. But unless you see someone consistently mess it up (thus, confusion about how it works), it's just a typo and not worth derailing conversation.

At least grammar nazis can tell themselves that they're spreading wisdom.

> Normally in English, 's indicates a possessive.

It seems that the opposite is true. ' indicates a contraction first, and possibly a possessive iff no such contraction exists.

"John is" is not contracted to "John's", so it's confusing to have "It is" contracted to "It's".

> "John is" is not contracted to "John's"

John's not sure he agrees.

> "John is" is not contracted to "John's"

It is, actually. It's just best avoided due to confusion unless you're doing it for quoting or dialogue purposes.

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/contracti...

Fun historical fact: "John's knife" was once a contraction of "John his knife".

No longer of course, the latter isn't grammatically correct in modern English. But that's where it comes from.

This is not true, it came from an inflectional ending in Old English. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/history-and-us... uses the example “cyning” (king) and “cyninges” (king’s). In theory the apostrophe stands for the missing e.

Goes to show I shouldn't trust something, just because it was taught to me in school...

For some reason my computer will underline both it’s and its with a red line, regardless of context.

On the plus side, it gets me to double check that I did it right. But it’s still really annoying!

There isn’t anything irregular about it, pronouns are just different from nouns. His, hers, yours, ours, theirs, its.

> It's as useful to the discussion as getting on your case for using the U+2019 quotation mark instead of an apostrophe in your contraction of "they’re" and "it’s" in your comment.

U+2019 is the preferred character to use for apostrophe according to the Unicode standard [1][2].

To stay on the point: I agree it’s annoying to be annoyed by such small, irrelevant details. I wish I could unlearn my {grammar,typo}-naziness most of the time.

[1]: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2019/index.htm [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Unicode

The author is not a native speaker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil

As a native speaker, it bothers me quite a bit.

As a native I'm always annoyed by the stupidity of English spelling and grammar. Two words pronounced the same, but spelled different. In spoken conversation we have no problem figuring out what is meant, but somehow we think readers are not smart enough to figure it out?

English spelling is badly in need of reform.

> as a non-native speaker I’m always shocked by these basic errors made by natives

After some years of living in an English speaking country, I started to make these native errors myself. Maybe they are not native, after all.

What always confused me was that "its" is meant to denote possession. For example, I find this to be more consistent.

Bob's purpose vs. It's purpose

For consistency, shouldn't we use: Bobs purpose

Bob, in this case, is a proper noun. It, in the other case, is a personal pronoun.

Generally, nouns can go from the nominative (subjective) case to the independent genitive (possessive) case by adding an apostrophe. If a word ends in "s", then the apostrophe goes after that "s". If the word does not end in "s", then you add an apostrophe, followed by an "s" after the end of the word.

A pronoun is treated differently than a proper or common noun when being used in its genitive case. Pronouns have declension (inflection) that can change their endings so they become different words.

For example, we can decline the pronouns to show possession using any of these cases:

Accusative (objective) case / Possessive Adjective case / Genitive (possessive) case

me / my / mine

you / your / yours

it / its / its

her / her / hers

him / his / his

us / our / ours

them / their / theirs

Case 1.* "The dog belongs to _"

Case 2. "This is _ dog".

Case 3. "That dog is _".

In all of these cases, a pronoun does not take an apostrophe, unlike you would see with common/proper nouns.

Note that this can apply to more than just the noun, in the case of "The Queen of England's dress", where Queen does not take the

I can only remember the rule by remembering that “its”, “his”, and “hers” are pronouns and none have apostrophes.

What if their name is "Bobs"? You'd have no way to distinguish the name as names are always going to be the least consistent part of the language - would you then use "Bobss"? But what if their name is "Bobss"…? ;-)

Funnily enough, if their name was Bobs then the possessive would be Bobs', but you'll see natives use Bobs's and even say "Bobses" (Gollum like) as it's confusing even for us. That kind of consistency isn't a strength of the language, and the education system is failing too many people (that's a whole other discussion).

> Funnily enough, if their name was Bobs then the possessive would be Bobs’

Actually, no; s’ is for possessives of plural nouns ending in s (well, an s or z sound, which might be an s, x, or z, but usually for a plural will be an s, and most plurals ending with s won't have it silent, but...); plural nouns not ending in s or singular nouns, including those ending in s, get ’s.

Except for the special rules for classical and Biblical names, where then the number of syllables in the base name (which then makes the s or z sound rule more interesting, because names ending with silent s, x, or z are a thing) becomes relevant because English.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-happens-t...

> as it's confusing even for us.

True, that.

I looked into this exact topic a few months ago when a cake decorator friend wanted to know what to write on the cake board for "name's christening" but the child's name ended in S. I applaud the attention to detail :)

Bobs’s

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/12/possessive.html

There's an article on the front page about Perl 7, I'm starting to wonder which one has the more difficult grammar ;-)

Many style guides recommend the "Bobs's" form over "Bobs'".

Those style guides also mention many more special cases, like "the students' questions" (but "the dutchess's hat", because students is plural and dutchess is singular) and even break that down to the case where the next word starts with s, like "the dutchess' style".

Basically, it is not by any means clear cut.

Genitive -s works in other languages (eg German) without apostrophe and without confusion.

How strange that the world does not want to use German as its lingua franca then.

Genau, jawohl! :-)

How do you know the author is a native speaker?

There are so many non-native speakers of english (owing to it being the current international language) I don't even bother correcting grammar anymore in code comments in pull requests anymore. Unless it's like, user facing or something. But anyways, all the better I suppose to focus on content.

Grammar will be fine when browsers and other tools will implement good grammar checking. I don't understand why browser developers don't focus on it. There are some companies like Grammarly solving that issue, but that should be standard feature rather than paid opt-in. I can translate website in Chrome with a single click, but I can't check grammar. And translation is a really hard task, while grammar is pretty much formalized and could be coded without any AI breakthroughs.

I'm not native speaker and my text likely contains a lot of errors. For example I fix spell errors, because browser underlines them instantly, I'd fix grammar errors and may be I would develop some kind of grammar literacy after some time with proper computer assistance.

> The extraneous apostrophe is such a common error as to border on acceptable usage.

And that's sad, especially since it leads to more ambiguity in sentences.

I couldn't think of an example that would trip up a native speaker. What was an example you had in mind?

I can think of a few two word statements ("It's tender") but they are meaningless outside of context anyway.