A Word, Please: I’s instinct is you know this is wrong

With all the working from home, cultural divisiveness, addiction to screens and the rise of AI “companions,” humans are becoming ever more isolated. That’s a bad thing. But there’s an upside. As we go through life desperately alone and starved for human contact, at least we’re less likely to make shared possessive errors like this one from a travel post on Reddit: “I bought my boyfriend and I’s tickets at the same time.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen “I’s,” but it’s still a shocker. Who thinks it would be a good idea to say, “That’s I’s car” or “I should get started filing I’s taxes” or “Do these pants make I’s backside look big”? No one.

We all know “I” isn’t used as a possessive. It’s a subject: I have a car. I filed my taxes. I am wearing unflattering pants.

So how do these errors happen? How can we get so confused about a pronoun we all know so well? Human contact. The other person. In the case of that Reddit poster, her boyfriend was the culprit. Had the poor woman flown to Hawaii alone, sure, she would have missed out on a marriage proposal, but at least she would have had the sense to say, “I bought my ticket.”

This error is related to the much more common “with John and I” mistake that, frankly, almost everyone makes. “With” is a preposition, prepositions take objects and “me,” not “I,” is the object form that belongs here: “with John and me.” But “I’s” takes this to a whole new level.

It’s a safe bet that people who misuse “I” labor under the false belief that “me” is incorrect or at least improper when paired with another person. A kid who says, “Billy and me are going to the park” gets corrected pretty swiftly: “It’s ‘Billy and I,’ not ‘me,’” adults tell them. The kid walks away with the lesson that, if he wants to get to the park with the least hassle possible, he should just always use “I.”

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On top of all that, we’re not taught how to handle shared possessives. Is it “My boyfriend’s and my” or “my boyfriend and my”? I’ve studied this stuff for years and even I am not comfortable with this.

I know the rules for shared possessives: “Ed’s and Louise’s cars” is correct if they own the cars individually. If they own the cars jointly, it’s “Ed and Louise’s cars.” That’s because the rule says that if possession is shared, Ed and Louise share an apostrophe and S, too. But when people possess things separately, each gets their own apostrophe and S.

That’s an easy rule when you’re working with nouns like Ed, but when you’re working with pronouns like “my,” things get weird. “Ed’s and my cars” is easy enough if Ed and I own our cars separately, but if we share cars, a strict reading of the rules requires us to say, “Ed and my cars.” The absence of an apostrophe and s after Ed’s name strikes me as unnatural. And I don’t hear other people saying “Ed and my …” No matter who owns what, they say “Ed’s and my.”

Other pronouns pose the same difficulty: If you want to talk about the jointly owned “Ed and Louisa’s cars” but you’re using a pronoun for Louisa, you’d get “Ed and her car,” which is unclear and sounds wrong.

In these cases, I openly defy the rule about sharing possession. I say “Ed’s and her cars” no matter whether they own the cars together or separately. As long as I’m not using “I’s,” it’s unlikely anyone will even know if I’m wrong.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at [email protected].