When we have a non-possessive s and a possessive s, we have both unvoiced and voiced. When we have an s and an apostrophe, we have one consonant that transitions from unvoiced to voiced, while with an s, apostrophe, s, the unvoiced and voiced are pronounced more as separate consonants. “It’s” only has an apostrophe when it’s a contraction of “it is”, and the apostrophe indicates a letter missed out, in much the same way as “don’t” for “do not” or “you’re” for “you are”.

Understanding the Context

When it is a pronoun you want to make a possessive pronoun, remember the rule that possessive pronouns don’t have an apostrophe. "Is" vs. "Are" when using (s) [duplicate] - English Language & Usage ... The word ending spelled apostrophe "s" is a phonemic /z/ in all the instances I can think of.

Key Insights

(But English spelling is not very regular, so there could be exceptions.) However, English has a morphophonemic rule that converts a voiced obstruent (e.g. /z/) to the corresponding voiceless phoneme (for /z/ that would be /s/) when the /z/ is immediately preceded by a voiceless obstruent phoneme. The ... When did it become correct to add an “s” to a singular possessive ... When I was young (early 90's) shit either only meant excrement (or comparisons to it) or drugs.

Final Thoughts

How and when it started being used for other things like "I am the shit" I think is a relatively new development. Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When a man suddenly stormed the stage during the keynote speech at last weekend’s Wikipedia conference in New York, the audience ... An AI agent was banned from editing Wikipedia pages... and that's when things got weird, with the agent publishing its complaints publicly. %s indicates a conversion type of string when using Python's string formatting capabilities.

More specifically, %s converts a specified value to a string using the str() function.