User:It's-is-not-a-genitive/IE



Tö cos'è?
Hi, I'm (which I'm adding mostly out of intrigue for those boxes,) an obscure playwright, experimental musician, and traveller living near Birmingham, in England, although I have spent quite a lot of time on the road, in a range of other places. I have been contributing to, and have been enjoying the quality of, Wikipedia for the last few years. I did not, until May '05, think of registering. I have submitted quite a few articles in the past, specifically about Birmingham's suburbs, European politics, languages and the like. Over here I also correct a lot of failures of grammar, down-and-out ones, rather than stylistic ones; I think that it is a shame when people do not know their own language. I do a lot of copyediting, some of which worsens my mental health, and I also do translations when I can get my mitts on them first. I am currently in the middle of making lots of spoken articles, for whatever there is a demand for, or whatever catches my eye. I am trying to eradicate the incorrect use of 'Brazillian' instead of 'Brazilian' on the Pædia, and also, I am also starting what will be a long and hard campaign to get rid of every instance where 'it's' is used incorrectly instead of 'its.' Also, I'm currently adding images to every magazine in Category:Women's Magazines where available, and adding to them where appropriate; and I always look out for vandalism to stamp out inanity and hatred. I love to spend hours cruising Wikipedia for new things. I never knew, until WP, for instance, that there used to be a country in between Belgium, Holland and Germany: Moresnet, which could have become the first Esperanto state. (Amazing!) It's amazing what one can find by randomly clicking. My passions in life are never waking up in the same country three days in a row, poetry, knowledge and languages; I totally agree with the old Spanish saying that to speak another language is to have another soul. As well as being a native speaker of English, I was a very odd child, (not much changes), and at the age of 4 or 5, I compelled my elderly grandfather to teach Old English to me, which I have spoken for nearly twenty years now. But, as they used to say before the Normans came, se ðe gelíþ raðe hé hamacgaþ. I have learnt many more languages over the years, whenever I got the possibility in fact. I am currently looking to learn a Central Asian language, such as Tajik, as I'm considering moving there. After that, the next language that I wish to learn is either Burmese, Estonian, or one of the native Mexican languages; these fascinate me.

are you serious with the it's thing?
I guess so: I confess to have once gone around town with a gaggle of people tip-exxing out false apostrophes. Well, it's a simple rule to distinguish 'its' and 'it's', and one that seems to be taught to no one. I think that most of you know it, though, here at Wikipedia, but I will explain (to add to my posterity :S.) Its is always the genitive, the possessive case which is an equivalent to your or Michael/'s/. It's is the bastardised version of 'it is', whose point I can see, although it complicates things for many people. (I cannot, however, see the point of couldn't, didn't and the like, which do not lessen the number of syllables and sound rather... lisping.) Now, many people mess the distinction up, because they are used to thinking that that if it belongs to someone then it must be 's. No. When it is a genitive pronoun (which relates to a specific person or thing), there is Never an 's. There is no 's on my or your or theirs; why should there be one with its?

Non-linguistic philosophy

 * Which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. - Hillel
 * A carnation is only as good as its petals - Làà
 * I want to defy the logic of all sex laws - Beck
 * Man hands on misery to man - Philip Larkin
 * Mensch muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um tanzende Sterne gebären zu können. - Nietzsche

Although I am rather influenced morality-wise by my liberal Jewish roots, my philosophy to life is rather Nietzschean and existentialist, above all else. Although roots and identity are important, I feel that there is a danger in identifying oneself mainly as a cog in a group. If what you are is a label, then you will live life according to someone else's rules, other than yours. Life, to me, is too short to be spent in an office, paying mortgages, slogging through shops, living in the backwash town in which they were born. It amazes me how many people will be nothing in life but non-notable drones, contributing nothing but tax money to the greater consciousness.

I detest capitalism, because it sells what we would call in Barią 'ombrācua', trite, purchasable dreams. The greatest present is one's own free will. Taking the executive decision, to climb the mountain and sit above the 55$-parade beneath, taking the opportunity to continuously explore this kaleidoscope of a world, is difficult, since society is structured in such a way to make it thus, and the yoke of money makes it even harder. We are all brought up, barraged with descriptions and norms, and, being as we humans are pack animals, we all fear lack of acceptance, and this ties down our free will. What is more: in the past, those who deviated from mental slavery were called heretics, or witches. To-day, they are similarly demeaned, given a startling array of psychological labels, and pills to make them 'normal.' Fermanagh Steve, when he and I spoke up in Liverpool in a queer old house, said that 'genius does not often come without "madness,"' and I tend to agree with him. Perfect sanity in psychology is 'fitting in[to]' a monochrome world, settling down, culling mad dreams. That, to me, is the anathæma to sanity. Add up the number of hours, days, years, that you have spent doing things that you did not want to do, and it's frightening to see how difficult it is to do what you yourself want.

To me, the only things that are truly 'evil' are the imposition of one person's will over another without a considerable obligation to do so (i.e. to stop them from imposing on a third person's will in an objectively more severe manner.) I am vehemently opposed to censorship, since there should be no bars on knowledge. However, I am strongly opposed to pornography, not only on feminist grounds, but also because I find that it is not a victimless indulgence; it contributes to a society based upon self-satisfaction; and a pornographised society unfortunately makes many either be sexual playthings, or face solitude. One of the most damaging traits in man is the willingness to let what one has heard be one's rationale, rather than experiencing and judging for oneself. This is exasperated in this age of pundits and experts. I remember that my grandmother used to think that nowhere but Birmingham and her home town in Ireland were safe, because she was constantly barraged by a news-media all too eager to poke their fingers into corpses. When London was bombed, a young (now former) acquaintance of mine was rather histrionic, saying that xe felt unsafe to go out. I replied that if terrorism results in paranoia and mistrust of one's fellow people, it has succeeded. Aside from the application of common sense, no prejudgement should ever be the replacement of experience and personal discovery.

Recent contributions or large changes
I've written on a bunch of weird things, mostly demanded articles. I'm trying to fill in the gaps of our 'Human Rights' collection of articles, too. None of these are anywhere close to being magna opera, but they're some contribution, at least. The ones in bold are the more decent looking.

I also do a lot of removing "it's" where "its" should be, and vice versa. For this, I was really kindly rewarded the minor barnstar.



treasury of links that I found interesting, but you probably will not

 * The bizarre world of Yugoslav profanity
 * Yiddish dictionary
 * The holy scripts of Beck
 * Portishead treasury
 * Pulp treasury
 * Joys of Yiddish
 * Iran's train system
 * The source of all that is good and verbish
 * How to get from the UK to anywhere in the world, overland.
 * All about Eve. Or Nirvana.
 * Elliott Smith resource
 * Perfectly expressed criticism of Simpsons under Mike Scully
 * Saddening article about lost languages
 * Overheard in New York
 * Albanian in Italy
 * MP3 blog by a random French guy with some good taste
 * Official website of the legendary Daniel Johnston
 * Descriptive grammar of Asturian, and of other languages that you may find a tad more spoken
 * Yoruba dictionary
 * The Fall: seminal band
 * Wonderful world of diaterics
 * Brezh
 * Lorca's tragedies, online
 * Brilliantly written guides to North Africa
 * Discover new music dependant on your mood. Get rid of pop and hits and tick discoveries, and one can find some very interesting songs.
 * Homosexuality in Juchitán
 * Interesting photograph collection.
 * Kazakh visas, for future reference.
 * I'm not the man you think I am, an exploration of Morrisey
 * Danish for cheap
 * Shocking piece on Torture Music. Real values eh?
 * [Transliterate into 10 Indic scripts!]

My view on copyright.


ch:User:Minaguem fr:User:It's-is-not-a-genitive