Honestly I’ve done mostly forgot, and with the proliferation of AI technologies and all the typos AI has read from in the training models, I bet AI isn’t always right about this either.
I usually just don’t care anymore, whether the autocorrect puts the apostrophe in or not.
I feel like that one isn’t that hard to remember because “its” stands out as a common exception to the rule for possessive singular nouns.
“It’s” is a contraction of “it is” while “its” is possessive.
“its” is comparable to “his” or “her”, not to e.g. “Dave’s”.
I think you meant hers, with an S, but I get your point. Does that mean “it” is/was meant to function as a pronoun?
Rhetorical question for the pronoun nazis, if I don’t know the sex/gender of a kitten, I’m gonna call it an it. If I don’t know the sex/gender of a human, I’m probably still gonna call it an it.
See post above, his, hers, and its are linguistically compatible, meaning that him, her, and it must be equally compatible.
The obvious issue with ‘it’ as a pronoun for a person (or in my opinion a mammal or other sentient animal) is that it’s literally objectifying them: The main use of ‘it’ is for inanimate objects. Sometimes that’s used for effect, for example calling a pedophile an it. But unless you really dislike a person of nonspecific gender, just call them a them.
Them was originally intended as plural though. When did people decide to jank up the defined language? They/them/those are meant as plural.
And I might have made a subtle mistake earlier. He/she/it are pronouns, him/her/it as well.
His/hers/its are possessive pronouns. Can we try to stick to some sort of standard in the language, with clarity and without offense?
Singular ‘they’ is centuries old. Apparently even older than singular ‘you’. It’s only recently that people tried to make it a rule that it should only be used as a plural, but really it’s used in natural language as a singular all the time like I did. (Did you notice it in the middle of my previous comment, not just the end?)
You never used the word they, you used the word them multiple times though.
Care to compare and contrast the difference?
It’s the same word in a different grammatical situation.
I meant her. Mike and his guitar; Sarah and her violin; The computer and its speakers.
Over the years, I’ve become more and more unsure on that one. I usually have excellent spelling and grammar, but it was so long ago when I learned the difference between its and it’s, that I’ve gradually assumed I’ve seen so many typos over the decades that I just couldn’t remember for sure.