I know it's not just me (see here) but the misuse of It's or Its does seem to be getting worse. For a while it would just pop up in occasional e-mails, but now I'm seeing it everywhere: PPT presentations, even one lot of proof read copy which I had to send back.
And the worst thing that happened recently is that I got an e-mail from someone as a draft e-mail to go out to lots of people. I corrected the misuse of "it's" in the mail, added in some other thoughts and then it went out a few minutes later to the fifty people on the list with guess what? Yes, all the wrong "It's" put back in. I felt humiliated and as if I had been publicly outed as someone who didn't know the rules of punctuation.
I mean come on it's not that difficult is it? If you want a simple explanation of the grammar and its application go here
OK but beyond my rant (which does mean I am get seriously old) there might be a very interesting thing going on here in the way the language is developing. If everyone sees "it's" all over the place and it's ratified by being in print or on a poster or even god forbid at some point in a newspaper, then society will start to take it on and make it culturally meaningful. "It's" will start to mean "Its".
This phenomenon is an interesting combination of semantic and grammatical drift at the same time. I am a firm believer in the fact that languages should develop and change and that words can and should change their meaning but on the other hand this isn't due to any great cultural shift or even the appropriation of a word by a particular group. Instead it seems to be communal laziness.
Any thoughts?