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Comment by pluies_public | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't the title read "its" instead of "it's"?

Sorry if it seems like nitpicking, but as a non-native English speaker I find it weird how often this issue comes up. If any native speaker here has any idea why this particular mistake is so prevalent, I'd be very interested.

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As long as we're getting one nit, let's get two of them: it should be "its" with a lower-case "i" instead of "It's." "Isn't" should also be in lower case, "isn't."

Even when composing a title with capitals, not all words should be capitalized. Setting "isn't" and "its" in lower-case makes the title easier to read and draws the eyes to the capitalized words that convey more meaning.

Sorry, I really should know better. I've fixed it.

I wouldn't sweat it, I strongly suspect that little elegant guidelines like this are slowly falling into disuse.

English is a "living language," which means that it sometimes grabs a beer, goes out back, has a smoke, and vomits in the gutter.

You are correct, in the case of "it's" the apostrophe doesn't indicate possession, but rather a contraction of 'it is'. I think it is a confusing edge case, which English has many of.

Yes, it's one of English's many confusing edge cases, as normally an apostrophe does indicate posession - you would say "David's book", or "Sarah's pc" - so this catches many people out (including me, quite often).

I wouldn't qualify it as an edge case. It was more of a change in philosophy about teaching kids to spell, which is something like "kids should spell it the way it sounds". The change started in the US at least 15 years ago. When I went through elementary school > 30 years ago, not using an apostrophe for a contraction caused a reduction in grade. Also, contractions were disallowed in formal writing. For instance, using a contraction in a paper was a reduction in grade.

Changing times and philosophies.

I'm a non-native English speaker as well. More than this specific example I hate when someone uses then instead of than, because it often makes the sentence hard to understand.

It's a pretty easy typo to make. I was an English major in college and am still fairly conscientious about these things, but our entire culture of quick text-messages, status updates, and all the of-the-moment acronyms that those entail is fairly antithetical to any kind of grammarian proof reading. Educated people often intentionally dispense with the apostrophe simply to save time, safely assuming the other person knows their meaning.

Shouldn't the title read: "But jobs are" without uppercase and the "it's".

No, "But its jobs are" would match the intent. Saying "But jobs are" would be a more general statement.

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