I’s

I’m not really quite sure how to understand the reasoning behind a new phrasing I’ve heard (but haven’t yet read) a few times now recently. Again just the other day, the host of a podcast said to her guest, By the time your and I’s interview appears, this will be old news. It’s a curious and ungrammatical way of simply saying our interview, but it gives us a chance to review and ponder how pronouns are standardly used in English grammar.

The concept at issue here is possession. Language, and more certainly prose language, makes statements about a world it sees, ultimately, to be made up of things. As the very craftsmaster of rationality, this kind of language regards certain things, which include persons and events, to stand in some relationship to other things in a particular scene, and one such relationship is possession: a possessor possesses a possessed. To speak of possession is not necessarily to mean ownership; it may mean that, as in the phrase my house, but possession might also intend to describe something, such as the cake’s ingredients, or to show mutual involvement, as in my wife or my husband.

It is this last relationship that is being expressed in the example we are considering here, your and I’s interview. Both pronouns, your and I’s, are meant to express an involvement each referent holds to the thing interview. The problem, however, is the incorrect (or more permissively, perhaps, nonstandard) construction I’s. The word I is a personal pronoun, and in order to show some kind of possession, the personal pronouns do not use an apostrophe, but have a distinct possessive form of their own: my for I’s, your for you’s, his or her or its for he’s, she’s, or it’s. We use the apostrophe with nouns, where it is placed immediately after the possessor, whether singular or plural: Jane’s interview, the students’ books.

All of this is straight-up basic English, so it’s a bit of a puzzle to understand the whence and why of the neologism I’s. We may dismiss it all and think no more about it (Times change. What’s the big deal?), but if we took the topic to a higher register, one that worried about language as an execution of skillful means, we could argue for a difference between things changing and things changing for a reason. Just as we make a distinction between freedom and license or obligation and duress, may we not also say that there is a difference between change and distortion—change for a reason which produces clarity, and unproductive change for no reason at all? If we regard language as an art—and as an art its precision is all important because the objectivity of precision is at the heart of reason—then what changes we make in skill and style should be to a purpose, to better what has been but which no longer avails. Picasso came to work in a way his predecessors did not because he saw time and space differently, and had to change the manner of painting to accommodate that vision. Change was made necessary, not unnecessarily.

The language arts should be conserving, whether conservative or liberal in their perspective. The old way of saying that was that one worked in or from a tradition as a warrant again idiosyncrasy, that entirely personal way of working that does not invite, but parries, the good thought and attentive comment of others who come to look for meaning in the artifact someone has created, in whatever medium. Always in the language arts there is the clear and present danger of nominalizing, of making something into a noun. With the curious expression I’s, there is the attempt even to make that humble pronoun into a loud noun (the apostrophe proves that), for no discernibly necessary reason. And therein lies a problem of wider importance, because the more we see only other things around us, we risk moving from the properly rational to the rationalistic: things once relatable become unrelatable, isolated individualities. And we humans do not like being alone.

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