The English language is wrong. Sorry chaps.

After writing something on here earlier this morning I was accosted by the apostrophe police (who incidentally don't seem to consider themselves important enough to merit capitalisation). After re-reading my turgid drivel on the subject of milk I can only assume that my heinous grammatical crime was the placement of an apostrophe in the word "Its".

Now this is a bone of contention for me. The apostrophe police, and your English teacher will tell you that the phrase "It is" may be shortened to "It's" with an apostrophe placed to represent the ommited letter i.

For instance:

"It is raining today" and "It's raining today" are both grammatically correct.

The problem comes when the word "Its" is used in the possessive sense.

"The milk took its downward journey to the floor" is correct, while "The milk took it's downward journey to the floor" is not.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the whole plethora of uses to which the apostrophe can be applied is to denote possession. The position of the apostrophe is based upon whether the possessor is singular or multiple, for instance:

"The horse's tail" describes the tail of one horse, while "The horses' tails" refers to the appendages located above the bottoms of multiple animals.

Using this rule, if our milk in the previous example was referred to by name, it would carry an apostrophe:

"the milk's downward journey to the floor"

This is correct because the milk is singular and the downward journey belongs to the milk. No-one else.

If we were to apply another name to our milk the rule would still apply. For instance, if we were to hypothetically assume our milk is called Dave, then the following would be correct:

"Dave's downward journey to the floor"

Now I quite often refer to my milk as "it". The word "it" is a fine word that can be used to describe many other things in the world besides milk, but it does the job rather nicely in this circumstance.

Used in this context, the word "it" replaces the noun - proper or otherwise - of the object to which we are referring.

"Pour the milk in my tea",
"Pour Dave in my tea"
and
"Pour it in my tea"

are all correct, providing the recipient of the instruction knows my milk is called Dave, and that the milk is what is being referred to by the term "It".

Following this rule, then it should be perfectly acceptable to substitute the noun in "the milk's downward journey" or "Dave's downward journey" with the word "it", giving:

"It's downward journey to the floor"

The downward journey belongs to "it" and is represented as such by the use of a possessive apostrophe.

The English language, however, does not allow me to do this. And thus, with the use of this perfectly reasonable and logical argument i deduce that the English language is wrong.

Q.E.D.