sophie@mnetor.UUCP (Sophie Quigley) (07/15/85)
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