Its, it’s: It’s a problem

Some pet linguistic peeves are indulged, I find, not for reasons of clarity or grammatical soundness, but out of petty pedantry, habitual curmudgeonliness, or some kind of character disorder. On the other hand, I’ve been accused – affectionately, I hope – of excessive tolerance in such matters. But I have peeves of my own, one of which is the confusion over its and it’s.

Lynne Truss considers this “the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation”. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves she writes that it “sets off a simple Pavlovian ‘kill’ response in the average stickler”, and goes on to fantasise – satirically, one hopes – about lightning strikes and unmarked graves.

My instincts are less violently judgemental. I don’t get wound up over its/it’s confusion – but I often wince at it, particularly when it appears in edited prose. So, I imagine, does Roger Ebert:

To summarise the difference: it’s is always a contraction of it is or it has. Usually the former. Keep this front and centre, and you’ll greatly reduce your chances of ever getting it wrong. Its is the possessive form of it – the third person neuter possessive pronoun. So you might write of a solitary ant: “It’s lost its way.”

It’s not just students, bloggers and learners who mix up its and it’s, but also people for whom words are central to their trade – journalists, broadcasters, reviewers, professors of law, and so on. I’ve seen lexicographers and linguists slip up.

Evidently it’s a major source of confusion – a mistake so common as to be virtually normalised. But I’m an editor with a hero-of-Haarlem complex, so I feel duty bound to do what I can. Lawrence Lessig almost put it well:

A look at the causes might shed some light. There are, I suspect, three main reasons for the confusion. One is that its is an exception to a well-known rule: Add apostrophe-s for possession. Hence the ill-advised leap from, say, the dog’s tail to *it’s tail. Another reason is contagion: the mistaken forms are very prevalent, and their every appearance reinforces the wrongness. The third main reason is that many people don’t care.

Apparently, iPhones auto-correct its to it’s, which might explain Mr Lessig’s lapse. A friend on Twitter thinks this faulty auto-correct feature is responsible for a fair proportion of the confusion on Twitter. She’s probably right. It’s also worth noting that its and it’s have quite a tangled history.

Maybe you’d consider its/it’s confusion a negligible matter – the pet rock of pet peeves. It rarely leads to misinterpretation, and it sure doesn’t amount to much on a cosmic scale. But careful readers will notice the mistake and consider it a sign of inattention, sloppiness, ignorance, or even illiteracy – especially if it’s repeated. So if you value good communication, it’s a distinction you ought to make, and make consistently.

That its/it’s mistakes occur in the prose of reputable publications and careful writers shows how easily confusion creeps in. But with vigilance and application we can defend ourselves from it. If you’re prone to this mix-up, even occasionally, you might want to condition yourself to observe the distinction. Here’s how. For as long as I can remember, I’ve habitually read erroneous it’s as it is. So, for example, in The Guardian last week I saw the following:

I automatically read this as “in all it is bewildering glory”, with a slight slow emphasis on “it is”. The same goes for these errors on the HSE and Galway City Council websites:

Semantically, I inferred what was meant, but in parallel I processed the absurdities (“it is companion book”; “it is environs”). Doing this for years has given me a kind of immunity, I think, by steadily and deeply embedding the rule in my nervous system. I’m very strongly sensitised to it. Accepting it’s as its would undermine this conditioning, so I don’t.

* * *

Update: I’ll use this space to add occasional examples I consider striking. For example, I didn’t expect to see the error slip past the editors at The Economist – but it did:

The mistake has since been fixed. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Plain English Campaign has fallen prey to this basic error:

Here’s The Boston Globe, not only getting it wrong, but misquoting the New York Times Magazine in the process:

The NYT itself has its moments of weakness:

The Guardian again:

And again:

In a post titled “Not OK”, here’s Language Log (third line from the bottom; subsequently fixed):

Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr:

John Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air:

Anthony de Mello’s One Minute Nonsense gets it right and wrong in the same sentence:

The BBC:

The BBC again:

The Channel 4 documentary Dispatches: After School Arms Club:

A pack of Siúcra granulated sugar:

Poetry Foundation; now fixed:

The BBC Entertainment News Twitter account, which acknowledged the mistake amusingly a few tweets later:

A headlining typo in Cois Coiribe, the newsletter of alumni and friends of National University of Ireland, Galway:

io9:

Both correct and incorrect forms of the possessive pronoun its appear in the same clause in my Penguin Books edition of The Haunting, a short supernatural novel by Margaret Mahy (the mistake occurs twice in the book):

Nicola Barker’s Five Miles From Outer Hope:

Brian Moore’s novel The Temptation of Eileen Hughes:

Mythmakers & Lawbreakers, edited by Margaret Killjoy; interview with Alan Moore:

An old New Yorker cartoon:

The Years with Ross by James Thurber:

Casey Miller and Kate Swift’s Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing:

Raymond Chander’s Philip Marlowe, edited by Byron Preiss, in the story ‘Star Bright’ by John Lutz:

Daniel D. O’Keeffe’s First Book of Irish Ballads:

Seth’s graphic novel It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken:

Val Mulkerns’ story ‘Humanae Vitae’ in Body and Soul, an anthology of Irish short stories edited by David Marcus:

Michael Connelly’s The Concrete Blonde:

Connelly’s The Burning Room:

Anaïs Nin, A Woman Speaks, edited by Evelyn Hinz:

John Lloyd and John Mitchinson’s The Book of General Ignorance:

William Gibson, Burning Chrome:

Roy Day, All About House Repair and Maintenance:

Philip K. Dick, The Golden Man:

Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip:

Roald Dahl, Matilda:

Daniel Clowes, Ghost World:

A tweet from the Irish Independent:

A headline in the Galway Independent newspaper reverses the usual its/it’s confusion:

As does my edition of Dashiell Hammett’s short story collection The Continental Op:

An errant apostrophe appears in the phrase “Many Worlds Interpretation” in John Gribbin’s book In Search of the Multiverse:

[more on apostrophes]

Note: this post also appears on the Visual Thesaurus (subscription required).