Nonsensical grammar
“The is a car of George’s.” Though grammatically correct, this makes no sense, We say “The car belongs to George” and we say “Give this car to George”, and “This car was from George”, and we even say “The house of George”, so why don’t we say “This is a car of George”? We don’t say “The house of the Rising Sun’s”, we say “The house of the rising sun.” We can also say “This is one of the cars of George.” So why not say “This is a car of George”?
This ties in with the issue of “It’s” versus “its”. This is another grammatical conundrum. If we say “Ralph’s house”, that makes perfect sense, meaning only “the house of Ralph” (or “the house of Ralph’s” which as I mentioned should be avoided). But if we say “It’s” then this can only be a contraction of “It + is”. The word “its” is employed instead to mean possession as in “its house”, which confuses endless numbers of people, even native speakers who constantly write “it’s” for possessive when no such word exists in the English language in that sense. In theory one can even say “the house of its”, meaning “its house”, but one can never say “the house of it’s” as if one is saying “the house of Ralph’s.” Why not just abandon “its” altogether and simply write “it’s” in all circumstances when possession is intended?
OTOH, why not just abandon ” ‘s ” entirely when referring to possession? And just say “This is the house of George” or “the car of Ralph”. Saying “Ralph’s house” confuses the statement with “Ralph is house”. Or “it’s house” or “the house of it” rather than saying the confusing “its house”. We should reserve ‘s when intending to say “is” (or when speaking poetically making a contraction out of any other word that ends in -s).
But if this is too much, then why not simply throw away the word “its” and starting writing “it’s” whenever possession is intended? If I live long enough I hope to write a book “English for a New American Century” which will propose many such innovations to make English more rational and effective in expression, including writing “n” for “and”, and Greek “theta” for “the”. But it’s not on the front burner.
