• Jake Farm@sopuli.xyz
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    5 days ago

    There is a lot of pedantry in English despite there being no central governing body over the language like French has.

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      5 days ago

      Yep!

      Personally, I’m deprecating “its”.

      The “its/it’s” distinction requires violation of the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. This exception to that rule is entirely arbitrary. The meaning is never ambiguous in context; the distinction exists solely to enable pedantry and confuse spell checkers.

      So, English will be better off by retiring “its”, relegating it to the trash heap along with “chuse”.

      “It’s” is now a homonym. Both the contraction rules and the possessive rules for apostrophe-s construction are maintained, and the only people who will cry about it are English teachers and other worthless pedants.

      I have spoken.