In the grand scheme of things this is no big deal, but it’s still quite puzzling: was everybody sick the day our teachers covered words like your/you’re, whose/who’s, to/too, its/it’s, and there/their/they’re? As we all know, e-mails, Facebook, tweets and their ilk are the world’s greatest repository of quickly-written, unproofed thoughts. “Everyone who has never posted an egregious typo in one of the three aforementioned formats, raise your hand!” Hmm… only a few brazen liars have a hand up.
But the deal is, we’re not talking about typos here – accidental misspellings of words you know how to spell. No, this little rant is about people who carefully type out sentences like, “Its there fault to,” when they really mean, “It’s their fault, too.” Or “Were on our own.” Come again? Or, “Your our kind of people.” Huh? Or what about “Bubba’s dog ran into it’s little house.” That literally means “Bubba’s dog ran into it is little house.”
The previous sentences should have read “We’re [we are] on our own,” and “You’re [you are] our kind of people.”
Well, I suspect that this post will change nothing, and yet the sun will still manage to rise again tomorrow.
FOOTNOTE: I would be embarrassed to admit how old I was before I learned the difference between its and it’s and began using them correctly. I also thought there was a third variation – its’ – and I used that often, too.