The Massachusetts Institute of Tautology Apostrophe Lesson
 

Here comes a lazy engineering student mongoose; its name is Rover. It's a stay-in-dorm mongoose. None of its relatives are geese. Rover isn't interested in anything but cucumber sandwiches for its lunch. Rover wonders why it's so long until lunch time today. Its next meal seems so far off, and its tummy is rumbling with mongoose rumbles. It's amazing how loud mongoose tummies can rumble when it's time for a cucumber sandwich. A smart young lady heard it. She had some cucumber sandwiches. They were hers, but she liked Rover, and she thought Rover needed one for lunch. So she took out a cucumber sandwich for it to eat. Rover ran up and bit into its crust. It's then that Rover's amazing laziness went away: Rover's student speed accelerated. Its small feet moved faster than hers did, and Rover ran away with that cucumber sandwich that had been hers but was now its sandwich. Rover the student mongoose was very happy and its tummy became very quiet. That's all the story.

It's a shaggy cucumber sandwich story about it and it's, and its ending is a BURP ? (I concede that if it's about math or physics, I'm lost.)

I just hit 5000 posts, so should get a pass for my wrong answer.

It's refreshing to read a story based within a student society where the protagonist is not obsessed with its gender.

I think you may be onto something Ann. Is there a mongoose - hen connection?

It's very shaggy, in its American sense.

This bolsters my suspicion that the average Math SAT score of MIT students is about 799, but the Verbal is somewhere south of 400.

The whole thing about possessive apostrophes (which abound) is that so few people currently have a grasp of the use of the possessive adjectives Its, His, Hers, which are ancient and need no apostrophes to possess anything. These three are not nouns. Nouns require apostrophes to form possessives.

I expect that the problem can be best remedied by what I look forward to seeing in this enlightened age: towels sold in supermarkets with all three of those possessive adjectives colorfully embroidered with focus-group-selected appropriate typefaces.

Is there a news story I'm missing? Why MIT? What is this post about Allen?

The post is about Allen seeking attention. It has nothing to do with news or poetry or the poetry contests or workouts the board is ostensibly supposed to accommodate. It's just Allen, again, saying , "look at me, look at me, look at me - aren't I clever?"

You're so right, Michael. It's posted in D & A. Don't lecture me about its appropriateness. Others can respond with their historical annoyance and general spleen or provide additional exercises that clarify grammatical or other blurry areas. MIT (the Institute of Tautology), that's a tough one to figure out, I guess.