a grammar tangent (was Re: HTML, etc,)

[Doug Yanega]

Apologies for those who will find this pointless, but (and not to pick on
Mike Dallwitz, despite appearances), all this talk of using proper latin,
etc., leads me to be a bit amused to note that, ironically, Mike makes what
may be THE most common new English grammatical error (new as in having
become widespread only in the last decade or so) aside from the word
"orientated". Again, I point this out in a spirit of good-humoredness, with
an associated question. In one spot Mike writes:

>It's not generally practical to publish comprehensive, comparative
>descriptions in hard copy, ...

followed shortly by

>This is also exemplified by the
>'Festuca of North America' database, and it's accompanying paper:

"It's" is a contraction of "it is", as in the first case, but the
possessive form of the pronoun (intended in the second case) is simply
"its" with no apostrophe, the same as yours, hers, theirs, and ours. I see
this error everywhere these days, even in ads for major companies in
magazines and on TV - and this is compounded by the increasing use of
apostrophes for *plurals*, which makes even *less* sense (a flyer I got
from the University Staff Assembly says "Spectator's are free, plus lot's
of good food!"; why these are the only words in the entire flyer
mis-apostrophized is beyond me, since you'd think the person responsible
would be consistent). Can anyone tell me *why* this particular class of
mistake has become so popular only in the last decade? Another thing to
blame on spell-checker software (like using "their" for "they're")?

Peace,


Doug Yanega       Dept. of Entomology           Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315
                  http://www.icb.ufmg.br/~dyanega/
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82