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>And NO, the genitive case of the definite neutral pronoun is not done with an aposthrophe Presumably, this is the technical term for the fact that, while it p
by JonnieCache 13y ago
>And NO, the genitive case of the definite neutral pronoun is not done with an aposthrophe
Presumably, this is the technical term for the fact that, while it possesses something, "it" doesn't get an apostrophe like in "the user's comment" because it's a pronoun and not a real noun, and thus not worthy of the extra punctuation?
Always found that confusing and arbitrary. I'm happy to take a slightly scattershot approach to apostrophes, as long as I'm not writing "10 apple's a pound". It's too far into the reeds of arbitrary grammatical prescriptivism for my liking, without conveying any useful extra meaning.
I didn't spend millions of years developing this highly adaptive fuzzy parser for nothing.
- mkr-hn 13y agoCommas are what really throw the parser off.
- JonnieCache 13y agoI love commas. They save me from having to carefully lay out my thoughts, I can just string them together and offload that task onto the reader. I need to use more semicolons, then I can make my sentences into an almost meaningless trail of tokens without actually breaking any grammatical rules.
- mkr-hn 13y agoI'm surprised I don't see more semicolons on HN, given the demographics.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoThink of it this way: possessive pronouns don't take an apostrophe - my, your, his, her, their, its.
- JonnieCache 13y agoI think someone told me that pronouns a special case of nouns when I was very small, and I can't seem to get over it. The clue is in the name after all.
- gte910h 13y agoI remember it by the fact that you never HAVE to use "it's".