Nit: please don't user "it's" unless you can substitute "it is" without changing your inteded meaning.

[Steve Holden]

Fuzzyman wrote:
> Bengt Richter wrote:
> 
>>Typos happen to all of us, but in case you hadn't realized what "it's"
>>is a contraction for ("it is"), now you do, and you can save yourself further
>>embarrassment (assuming you care ;-).
>>If your friends won't tell you, who will ;-)
>>
> 
> 
> Making grammatical errors in the subject of a post on gramamtical
> errors must be embarrasing. ;-)
> 
Almost as *embarrassing* as making two spelling errors in one sentence 
complaining about grammatical errors (though I'll charitably accept the 
second one as a typo, and gladly hold my hands up to being a dreadful 
committer of the typographical error myself). What grammatical errors 
were you trying to point out, by the way?

> 
>>Write the contraction "it's" only when you want its meaning
>>to be "it is," otherwise it's wrong ;-)
>>
>>OTOH, how does one punctuate the posessive of a word per se?
>>E.g., the first letter of "it" is "i", but can one write that
>>as "it"'s first letter is "i," or it's first letter is "i" ? ;-)
>>And how many "it"s (?) are there in the previous sentence?
>>
> 
> 
> Don't recall an answer to this one in "Eats, Shoots and Leaves".
> 
> The first one is clearer :
> 
>     "it"'s first letter is "i"
> 
> 
Best of all is to eschew the unknown and adopt a phrasing that gives an 
unambiguously correct answer: 'The first letter of "it" is "i"'.

regards
  Steve
-- 
Steve Holden       +44 150 684 7255  +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC                     www.holdenweb.com
PyCon TX 2006                  www.python.org/pycon/