--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, t3rinity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > Surely it's, if allowed would be confused with > 'it is'
Well, the grammatical context is usually different enough that there wouldn't be any actual confusion (other than, "What the hell is that apostrophe doing there?"). In other words, a sentence will make sense only with the correct spelling. E.g., "The dog wagged it is [it's] tail" is nonsense. A native speaker would either ignore the apostrophe or be annoyed by it, as opposed to being confused by it. Might cause trouble for a non-native speaker who was in the process of learning to read and write English and didn't yet have a grasp of English syntax, though. My guess is that a non-native speaker who had as good a command of written English as you do would be likely simply not to notice the apostrophe and read the example as "its," because that's what naturally fits the syntax of the sentence.
