• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Oh Well

  • About This Blog

A link for Jax

14 July 2007 by Tim 7 Comments

Because I’m bored of hearing it said and seeing it written. It should be bored with or bored by.

And I still don’t get why it’s not correct to put an apostrophe before the ‘s’ in ‘its’. It’s a possessive so its ‘s’ damn well should have an apostrophe (if you feel like explaining to me why a perfectly good possessive shouldn’t have a perfectly good apostrophe, please don’t bother. It won’t work).

Filed Under: General

« Heard on CBBC
It’s Summer. ALL DAY! »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Barbara says

    14 July 2007 at 15:07

    Tim, I’m with you. There is no rational explanation.
    Mine = ‘of me’
    His = ‘of him’ (not ‘of hi’, which is why ‘hi’s’ is daft)
    Ours = ‘of us’ (not ‘of our’ which means something else)
    Theirs = ‘of them’ (again, not ‘of their’)
    so all irregular so to use them as justification for the lack of apostrophe in *all* possessive pronouns is pointless, as clearly even those above that end in ‘s’ don’t follow the rule anyway.
    Also, to comment that ‘her’s’ is ‘equally’ erroneous to ‘hi’s’ is daft. It may also be erroneous (but at least it follows the recognised rule so is an understandable error). The idea of equality is superfluous.

    Reply
  2. Gem says

    14 July 2007 at 15:36

    Because the apostrophe is already taken by it+is= it’s. How would you tell the difference?

    Reply
  3. Daddybean says

    14 July 2007 at 16:42

    Oh, I’m so bored of blog posts going on about grammar.

    Reply
  4. Tim says

    14 July 2007 at 18:13

    Gem, like I said, no point trying to explain to me. Interested though that you think any English grammar rule might feel the need to make any kind of logical sense. 🙂
    Chris, of course you are, I only posted this out of desperation, because I knew that if I did I would get some comments. I have been absolutely gutted that the previous several posts of mine, which were my usual exciting and inspiring fare have been more or less ignored. I mean, I didn’t even get flamed for suggesting that they should be looking for a cure for Northernness. And I thought the one about the Moral High Ground was really funny, but no-one even posted a roffle.

    Reply
  5. Gem says

    14 July 2007 at 19:17

    Oh, I was just throwing that out there — English really doesn’t have many rules that make logical sense, does it? Plus, it did make me think. Its really should be a plural (is there a plural usage to it?), not possessive, but I didn’t make the rules. There’s always the adage (I have since learned is false) that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. Turns out that’s only in Latin!

    Reply
  6. HelenHaricot says

    14 July 2007 at 23:04

    sorry tim, the moral high ground one was funny – i will go and post a rofl!

    Reply
  7. Gill says

    16 July 2007 at 21:33

    I was roffling inside. 🙂

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Footer

Archives

Categories

Search

Copyright © 2025 · Tim Marchant · Cookie Policy · Privacy Policy · Log in