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

[Seán Fitzpatrick]

Latitudinarian codswallop.  <<"Any thing" go's.>>  And that's "final".

I have encountered the supposed rule that "who-whose-whom" cannot be used
with non-human antecedents several times in the past few decades.

The programmers I work with often use non-neutral personal pronouns to refer
to programs and modules:  "... If he can't find a match he throws an
exception and dies".  I don't go that far, but I would say "whose hard
drive".

Seán Fitzpatrick
No oil for pacifists!
http://www.logomachon.blogspot.com/
-----Original Message-----
From: Laurence Horn [mailto:laurence.horn at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 10:11 AM
Subject: Re: "I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently packed
in."

At 9:02 AM -0500 2/16/11, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>At this level, anything goes.
>
>JL

Shouldn't that be "anything go's"?

LH

>
>On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 8:31 AM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
>
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>  -----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
>>  Subject:      Re: "I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently
>>  packed
>>               in."
>>
>>
>>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
>>
>>  But shouldn't possessive "that + s" be spelled without the apostrophe,
by
>>  analogy with the other possessive pronouns--"its," "hers," "his,"
"ours,"
>>  "whose"?
>>
>>  --Charlie
>>
>>  ________________________________________
>>  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
>>
>>
>>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
>>
>>  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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>
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