It’s gets it’s due.
I shout into the darkness: There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this sentence: “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover.”
I await the persnickitor’s nasty missive, writing: “That’s an illiterate’s statement! It’s its! No apostrophe! It’s its!”
If that’s an absolute, then why would the persnickitor not blink at writing “illiterate’s statement” instead of “illiterates statement”? Let’s look at it’s a bit’s more closely.
•“The dog destroyed its master’s table legs.” Good grammar. Bad dog.
•“The dog destroyed it’s masters table legs.” Bad grammar. Still bad dog.
•“The dog destroyed it’s master’s table legs.” Bad grammar. Maybe master should get a cat.
Or, in the case of that last sentence, I should say: Good grammar. Bad convention.
Which is my ultimate point. Removing the apostrophe from it’s to distinguish possessive from contraction of “it is” or “it has” is
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Bill Brohaugh
convention, and a relatively recent one. Grammatically, you form a possessive by adding apostrophe-s. “It” possesses something. It+apostrophe+s. Yes, it is a pronoun, and no definite pronouns take apostrophes, but its is a recent invention without the pedigree of a his or a hers or a yours.
When the possessive of the ungendered pronoun it was first used, it was not its; it was. . . his. He, his; she, hers; it, his. But around 1600, his began being replaced with other forms, including hit (presumably on the pattern of beginning his and hers with the letter H) and it's (constructed the way we construct possessives in general). Shakespeare used both his and it's as neuter pronoun possessive. But during the 1600s, the spelling of its came into play, again presumably on the pattern of other pronoun possessives (mine, his, hers, thine, theirs) sporting no apostrophe, though Evan Morris writes on www.word-detective.com that the waning use of the contraction 'tis and the confusion caused by its (yes, I know, ironic) replacement it’s fueled the rise of its.
If its is good grammar as a possessive, then why aren’t we writing that middle sentence “The dog destroyed its masters table legs”? Why remove one apostrophe and not the other? Perhaps a more pertinent question is Why insert the apostrophe in either? English writers didn’t used to. One method of indicating possessives from Old English was adding S—as in cyninges (what we would write as king’s, with the E fully pronounced. But among many changes over time, the vowel was swallowed in speech, and often replaced in writing with an apostrophe indicating the swallowed letter. This is the same mechanism that led to the way swallow’d and other past-tense verbs were often written for a time. But
where the apostrophe clung to the writing of possessives, it did not cling to the writing of past tense. Feel edify’d yet?
Any way you look at it, I will continue to use its, of course, as the accepted usage as a possessive. But I do so knowing that I’m adhering to convention, usage, and changing language, and not to grammar.
'Tis a darn shame.