In days of yore, your and you're were separate words. Should it stay that way today?

Dropping the spelling distinction? Wrong. Wrong. WRONG!

I will picket city hall, should that become the standard! I won’t lay down my rights for fair spelling!

Totally wrong, and just utter laziness.

@ETpro: “Confusing your and you’re has become so commonplace today that there’s been talk of going with the flow and dropping the spelling distinction.”

I hope you’re kidding. While I am prone to typos (I write like sh*t) and I’m sure I have made this error before, I am serious when I say that I have a difficult time understanding the sentence when this error occurs.

This is wrong – in a “I’m calling the U.N. Human Rights Council to see if they can stop this” wrong.

U R correct. These are three seperate words. All three should remain.
Idiocy needs to be done away with instead.

Someone on my Facebook page sent this to the multitudes today…from someecards.com

A picture of a musketeer who is saying;

Grammar; the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.

(Separate)

I turned down a job in Special Education because the teacher I would be working with had used your instead of you’re in a sentence written on the chalkboard. Language changes all the time because of popular usage. I don’t know that we can stop it. Why did the collective noun troop become a single being? Why did the word issue, a topic, become issue, a problem?

Ack! @Sunny2, troop drives me nuts!

I must take the middle ground here and say, it depends. There are two schools of thought in linguistics and it is wise in my opinion to get acquainted with them before stating anything concrete on the subject; go here to get an idea of I am talking about.

We may curse the damned simpletons who cannot be arsed to spell properly, but the truth of the matter is language does not care. It is a living, growing thing and it WILL change. Do we nowadays really care what the norman invasion of 1066 did to Old English? Not one bit. Same goes for Middle English, the slang of the 1920s or the 1960s – language will change whether we want it to or not.

<rant>Having said that, I am, nevertheless, OUTRAGED at any and all instances of butchering the English language by the hordes of its undereducated speakers. I find the idea that someone might even put this notion forward (that you’re and your be spelled the same) as daft as the whole creationism vs. evolution debate – it’s one of those things that shouldn’t even be considered as up for bleeding debate. </rant>

What? They mean completely different things! Why on earth would you change the spelling of one to match the other?!?!?!?!

And which one would be the winner of the “we like your spelling best” contest?

Also, Americans would have to stop calling their language English, because the rest of the English-speaking world would disown it.

If you’re looking for some daily torture, count the number of times “it’s” is misused on fluther There is something hypnotic about the apostrophe key.

Some people claim, and I believe them, that on the iPhone spellcheck makes it impossible to write “its.”

@gailcalled “The… horror!” I’m definitely one of those people :P

Of course they should remain separate: they aren’t even the same form of word (possessive pronoun versus contraction of a pronoun and verb.)

To quote something I saw on Facebook: “Grammar: the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.”

From someecards.com

@marinelife:^^ See me, fifth from top. I was not able to pinpoint that card from someecards.com however.

I don’t know about y’all, but I pronounce them differently.

I pronounce “yore” and “your’ the same: /jɔɹ/, but I pronounce “you’re” /jʊəɹ/ (or /juəɹ/). Obviously, unstressed, they both come out /jər/, but I never pronounce “you’re” rhyming with “yore”.

So for that reason I would never confuse them other than a typing error. And that’s another thing, and I say this a million times and no one seems to care, but most of the time when people mix “you’re/your” or “it’s/its”, it’s not because they don’t understand the difference, it’s because they’re similar and when typing quickly, it’s easy to make an error like that.

@gailcalled Two minds with but a single thought. I thought it was funny.

I did too but can’t find the original.

It is bad enough that English has no proper plural of ‘yous’... now THIS? no no no…. Your is one thing… You’re is completely different. I, unlike the majority of Americans, have bothered to learn a second language. This distinction is important. Even the slang dialects in Norwegian exemplify the difference, so if Americans get any lazier… I think I will just ignore the culture completely.

We should be educating the ignorant than dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.

It’d also make it even more difficult for ESL’ers to make homonyms with multiple contextual meanings that don’t need to be.

@cazzie There is a proper plural of “you”. It’s “you”.

omg here we go again, this is not a strictly American error. I live in Australia and the mistake is very common here. There are different nationalities represented on Fluther and the mistake is here as well. And many of the english speaking tourists from all over the world that I come into contact with make the same mistake.But the one that I hate the most is so prevalent here it makes me crazy, saying use for the plural of you.

Wait, wait the one I hate the most really is being referred to as a guy!!! “You guys” to a mixed group seems to be a completely acceptable form of address. I don’t like it!

In days of yore? It is still that way in 2012. Why would it not be that way—they are completely different and with different meanings. I never agree with dumbing things down to make it easier for the lazy and the would-be idiots.

Their they’re, folks. Don’t shoot the messenger. I know they are separate words. In face, your and you’re aren’t even pronounced alike. Butt sum seam two bee Miss Spelling awl.

@Hawaii_Jake Let’s here it four fare spelling!

@downtide Agreed. That’s what is behind much of the failure to learn. I do feel for those who lack opportunity, but not for those who simply can’t be bothered.

@tom_g Hear, hear! Let’s form a protest, or boycott, or something.

@SpatzieLover Doing away with idiocy is a nobel aspiration. Of course, there are people with marginal IQ courtesy of Mother Nature. They are exempt. There are those who, through no fault of their own, never had the opportunity to learn proper grammar and usage. They deserve our help. The trick would be lighting a fire under those who simply couldn’t be bothered to learn.

@gailcalled That’s a fabulous line, and also an example where making the spelling and pronunciation of the two words the same would render the entire sentence meaningless.

@Sunny2 I would have done the same. Having to work for a mental midget is a constant annoyance

@fremen_warrior You have the context here, so what else is required to take a side? To be sure, language is and should be a dynamic thing. Early or Middle English would be of little good in explaining quantum mechanics. But should laziness and lack of education ever be the primary driving forces behind the evolutin of our language?

@dappled_leaves Taking the part of Devil’s Advocate, how about yoar and it serves for all three previous spellings? NO! Forget I ever floated the idea.

@gailcalled I think the spell and grammar checker in Microsoft Word is great because it usually can tell which os needed (it’s or its) based on the context.

@muppetish Agreed.

@DominicX Correct. I have noticed, though, that many who confuse the written forms pronounce them as if there were no difference in the words.

@cazzie I hear you. How about “Youse guys…”

@sinscriven I completely agree. In engineering, we are fond of noting that whenever you try to design something idiot proof, they will render your work worthless by developing an improved idiot.

@rooeytoo How depressing.

@MollyMcGuire It certainly seems that in the days of yore, everyone knew that. Sadly, today all to many do not.

@dappled_leaves yes, you can say, you, but that doesn’t differentiate. In other languages there is a separate word for when you address several people as ‘you’. Another thing English lacks is when someone writes a sentence like this: Marsha and her sister didn’t understand the instructions that came with her furniture. We don’t know which ‘she’ is the owner of the furniture. In Norwegian it is addressed with a separate pronoun. So we can say, ‘sin’ furniture and know it is the sister’s or we can say, ‘Marshas sin’ furniture, and we know the furniture belongs to Marsha. OR, perhaps it was someone else’s furniture and we then use the pronoun for him or her, meaning a completely different person not spoken about in the sentence. Norwegian makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

@cazzie It’s true that the word itself doesn’t allow us to distinguish singular from plural, but that is usually evident in context, or can be made obvious by the wording of the sentence. It really is possible to live a life without resorting to “yous” or “y’all” (or “you guys” and the painful, increasingly present possessives “your guy’s” and “your guys’s”) and yet be understood. Honest.

or you could do as some of my German relatives do…actually many Milwaukeans do…Say “Hey Yous!” ;)

I think we can all agree the answer is to replace all three with ur.

A language can’t have too many homonyms. The Corpus of Contemporary American English “includes 20 million words each year from 1990–2011.” That’s so many that I occasionally forget some of them; I look forward to the day when such a corpus will contain just a single word, probably “fuck.”

Everyone relax. We’ve always had trouble with the apostrophe. It’s been used for elided letters, plurals, and genitives, and there has rarely been any consistency. We’ll survive.

“it appears from the evidence that there was never a golden age in which the rules for the use of the possessive apostrophe in English were clear-cut and known, understood, and followed by most educated people.” – The Oxford Companion to the English Language

Well I sure hope yore right in you’re assessment of the days of your, @morphail :-)

@ETpro NO!!! ‘I hope you are’ ..... ‘in your assessment’..... Oh my holy toast…..

@cazzie Ewe were-ship the holy toast two? Who new?

@ETpro yes, but only my version of the holy toast, because I know only my toast is the one true toast and no other is because it told me. It doesn’t allow me to use ‘text speak’ when I write SMS’s and it insists that if I ‘emote’ I must use a ‘nose’, like :o) or ;-)