Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 8 · column 5 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
the Superintendent of Documents in 1982. Plain as day: “IT’S inspection laws.”
I checked every copy of the Constitution in the office. The World Book and The World Almanac have it right: “ITS inspection laws.” In Jeffrey St. John’s “Constitutional Journal,” the line appears properly as ITS. But in the Oxford Companion to the Surpreme Court, one finds “IT’S inspection laws.” Same thing in the Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court, published by Congressional Quarterly.
How could this be? The Founding Fathers who met at Philadelphia in 1787 were the most learned men in the fledgling U.S.A.- They knew their punctuation. They argued over whether the general welfare clause should have a comma or a semicolon. The possessive “its” appears four other times in the Constitution, and each time it is spelled correctly.
Well! The whole business is shocking. Shocking! But to move from the sublime: In the comic strip “Wizard of Id” we find the king complaining, “Every country has a day celebrating it’s founding father.” Wrong! A cartoon in New York Newsday has a half-frozen citizen saying, “Oh, look—spring is on it’s way.” Noway!
Last month a federal judge in California removed a small bird, the California gnatcatcher, from the protected list. Said a conservationist in The New York Time, “Without it’s listing as a threatened species, it’s going to be business as usual for the developers.” Come now, New York Times!
One way to get it right is to re
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