How to Use There, Their and They’re

Go.

Read this.

Stop being one of the people who embarrass or annoy me.

Holy crap on a stick, that annoys the hell out of me.

People who do that, there imbeciles. Seriously, they're teachers should be ashamed for not teaching them better.

Hrm... I may have made a mistake or too back their, two. Yeesh, all this grammar stuff is to hard for me.

*ducks*

Whatever you say, Mr. Its/It's. And hey, everybody out there trying to sound all professional? Don't use "indicate" when you mean "state." And don't use "utilize." Just don't.

My brain is broken when it comes to it's/its. I don't know why.

Unfortunately (for me) it's not broken when it comes to there/their/they're.

That last one should be simple enough, Doyce. "It's" is a contraction of "it is" or "it has." That's it. Period. No other options. Apostrophe not allowed for showing possession ("its" is like "his" and "hers").

No. I get the rule. The rule's easy. I just add the 's all the time without thinking of it, and I don't "see" it when I'm typing it. The other one, I look for, and it's I just... don't.

It's weird. I dunno why.

Brain lesions leading to zombification. Duh.

Actually, it's the possessive. My subconscious wants "its horrible breath" to be "it's horrible breath." I think it just bugs me that that's the one possessive that doesn't follow the rule, and somehow the possessive rule should trump the its/it's rule.

Because "Dave's car" isn't "Dave is car," is it? Why is "it's car" = "it is car"?

Because it does. It's does. Its does. Something.

Braaaaains.

Put another way, there is no rule going unobserved with there, their, and they're.

Two rules of English grammar intersect at its/it's -- the rules for showing possession and for contracting "[word] is."

"It's" is the ONLY place where you don't just use 's for both -- probably because it wasn't grammatically acceptable to write "Dave's coming over tonight" until fairly recently; I think if I'd done that in grade school, a teacher would have chided me, saying something like "You're saying that Dave owns something called 'coming over tonight'? How interesting."

Because of that, there wasn't a perceived 'overlap' elsewhere in the language: If you said "Dave's [something]" that meant he owned it, and if you wanted to contract "Dave is coming over," well, you just didn't do that.

"It's" has been around longer in 'acceptable' English, so some idiot decided that having "it's" mean two different thing, based on context, was confusing.

So they decided that "its" indicated a possessive -- that it would be the one exception to the rule.

It's stupid. We've been figuring out which one we mean in spoken English for centuries, and could have done so just as well in written English.

It's a dumb rule, pointlessly tacked on, and while I go back and fix it in things I write (when I miss it, and I don't ALWAYS miss it) because I want to seem as though I know what I'm doing, my hind brain recognizes it for what it is -- trash.

So, which idiot had the clout to force that change?

Sounds like a committee decision to me, though that might be the last week of work talking.