"I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently packed in."

Charles C Doyle cdoyle at UGA.EDU
Wed Feb 16 13:31:21 UTC 2011


But shouldn't possessive "that + s" be spelled without the apostrophe, by analogy with the other possessive pronouns--"its," "hers," "his," "ours," "whose"?

--Charlie

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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Joel S. Berson [Berson at ATT.NET]
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2011 10:57 PM
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At 2/15/2011 05:45 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>I mentioned this some years ago. I had a freshman in the early '80s who
>insisted that "that's" was correct because "whose" referred to people.

Whose what I would have said.  And I would have said "whose".

Joel

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