Say ‘its’ out loud. Now say ‘it’s’ out loud. Besides the stunning number of apostrophes in the second sentence, there’s not much of a difference – or is there?
Much like the great mysteries of life, like Where’s Wally and Who Is Adele Dazeem, many people cannot comprehend the difference between the two. It’s almost as if you had identical twins, one of them had a ear missing, and you still can’t tell the difference.
Why, yes, as a matter of fact. Google is alarmingly clever when there’s a clever person using it.
Anyhow, let’s take a look at one of the most famous lines in cinematic history (and no, I’m not talking about the thin red one) –
Looks good? No, but a) we’re talking about the grammar here, b) I’m using a Bamboo tablet with NO PEN PRESSURE and c) it’s Frankenstein’s monster, what did you expect. At least it makes sense, right? Now how about if we consider this:
Frankenstein in this case, is noun-ifying the word ‘Alive’ and it becomes an actual physical Thing, like a weird combination of Olivia Newton John and Benjamin Grimm. Now you know the true reason why people were running out of the cinemas.
The easy-version of this is: its is a posessive pronoun rather like ‘his’, ‘hers’, or ‘theirs’. Just as ‘his’ belongs to him, ‘hers’ belongs to ‘her’ and ‘theirs’ belongs to ‘them’, ‘its’ belongs to ‘it’.
Meanwhile, ‘it’s’ is a contraction, although less painful than pregnancy, of the words ‘it’ and ‘is’ or ‘it’ and ‘has’. Basically, you’re being lazy.
Now, putting everything together and also throwing in a zombie movie just because we can, we get:
Obviously, the guy who’s about to get eaten is questioning the state of the zombie’s head: or rather, why there’s only about two thirds of it left. This is correct and normal (in the context of a zombie movie). If you add a random stroke that so happens to be between the ‘t’ and the ‘s’, though –
then the thing that the guy who’s about to get eaten is pointing to is an entire head. (Oh my god – it is head.) This is not so correct and not so normal, even in the context of a zombie movie.
Now that you know the difference, you can become a grammarnazi who goes around drawing irrelevant comics on other people. Or don’t. Its actually super annoying.
the grumpy bulldog 