I Put On My Thinking Cap

I used to hate it when my grammar-school teacher would link two or three things that sound alike but mean different things. "Oh, no!" I would wail to myself. "Now I'll always think of one thing when I think of the other, and that will confuse me." So I would put in extra effort to file the info away in two different places, one for its, let's say, and one for it's.

Its is a possessive pronoun. Possessive meaning, "belongs to." I'm talking about a magazine and I want to refer to the cover: its cover. Pronoun meaning not a noun (the name of a person, place, or thing), but a special stand-in word, like I, you, he, she, it, we, y'all, they.

One of the South's greatest contributions to the English language is y'all. We no longer have an intimate you, formerly thee, thou, thy, thine, like French, Italian, Spanish. We have never had a plural you, other than you (implied plural). Y'all is perfect. You becomes the form of address for a single person (possibly an intimate); y'all becomes the form of address for a group.

It's is a contraction; that is, the phrase used to be longer, "it is," but, when you put the apostrophe (') in place of the letter i in is, you can use a shorter, more colloquial sounding phrase: it's. "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's . . . Superman!"

Simple as that.