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From: sophie@mnetor.UUCP (Sophie Quigley)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: "who's life?"
Message-ID: <1300@mnetor.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 15-Jul-85 10:46:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: mnetor.1300
Posted: Mon Jul 15 10:46:40 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 15-Jul-85 12:22:20 EDT
References: <385@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA>, <329@mit-vax.UUCP> <159@pyuxii.UUCP>
Organization: Computer X (CANADA) Ltd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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I have been reading a lot of articles that contain the following sentence:

> Well, your wrong.
or
> who's life is it?

I know, I know, there's alrady been a lot of flaming on the subject,
but anyway.  "your" and "you're" are pretty confusing like "there" and
"their" and "they're" and "who's" and "whose" but there is one simple
rule to remember, the apostrophe stands for something that has been
removed from the text to ease spoken english, so "you're" means "you
are" and "they're" means "they are" and "who's" is "who is".

Whenever you are confused about whether or not to use the apostrophe,
replace it by the real verb (are) and see whether the sentence makes
sense of not.  If it does, then there you are.

So in the 1st sentence, replacing "your" yields "you are wrong", which
makes perfect sense. So the sentence should be "you're wrong"
In the second sentence, replacing "who's" yields "who is life is it?"
which doesn't make any sence.  The sentence should be "whose life is it?"

End of lecture.
-- 
Sophie Quigley
{allegra|decvax|ihnp4|linus|watmath}!utzoo!mnetor!sophie