The Advocate, Grammar, and Me

You grammar and spelling types may have noticed that in the previous entry, I switched from writing "the Advocate" to "The Advocate." That's because I learned that the paper is actually called "The Advocate" and not "the Stamford Advocate." However, I'm reluctant to call it "The Advocate" when there are clearly other Advocates in existence. Frankly, it's a little presumptuous. It's not the Advocate, so it makes me a little mad that to be correct, I have to call it that. You could say that I'm sensitive, grammar and caps-wise.

Speaking of which, I just joined Wikipedia and made my first correction, because in the entry about the Stamford Advocate (or whatever the hell this paper is) it said,

The newspaper and it's sister paper, The Greenwich Time, were sold to Hearst Corp. for $62.4 million in a deal with it's previous owner, the Tribune Corporation, that closed on Nov. 1., 2007.

OK, I'm going to tell you. "It's" is short for "it is." Even if it's the possessive "it," you do not add the apostrophe-s, because that would mean "it is." That is an exception to the possessive rule, and you're just going to have to accept it. It's one of the more subtle yet very common grammar errors that otherwise good grammarians make.

I'm still a little bitter about "The Advocate." If I call it that, no one knows it's Stamford. So do I call it Stamford's The Advocate? That's awkward. This is just one more case of the Advocate messing with my mind.