Not in the sense of "you are", but rather, I'm writing a poem for my girlfriend and I wrote this line: "Loving you's no hassle." I don't want to use anything incorrect, but I also feel like in this case, it works, and I could get away with it even if it is not considered a proper contraction.
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13Yes, the rules of the grammar mean that you can 'contract' is with the Subject. In your sentence the Subject is the phrase "Loving you", and therefore we see/hear "Loving you's ..." The fact that the Subject ends with the word "you" isn't a problem.– Araucaria - HimCommented Nov 21, 2022 at 1:19
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12Regardless of what the debate comes to, I would say writing a poem is definitely a time when you can use poetic license.– bubblekingCommented Nov 21, 2022 at 16:16
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2Making bread's no hassle.– ermanenCommented Nov 21, 2022 at 17:14
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2@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. You can’t ‘contract’ (weaken) it as the last word in the sentence. Telling (you is not / you’s not / you isn’t) easy but showing you is. <-- That one at the end cannot be weakened. No more so than can be I’m not hungry but Jim is., or even just plain Jim is.– tchrist ♦Commented Nov 21, 2022 at 22:17
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3@davidbak, no, youse is the plural, not the contraction.– mcalexCommented Nov 22, 2022 at 7:15
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3 Answers
There is no very specific definition of what "proper contraction" means. From some people's point of view, it is most "proper" to avoid contractions altogether—despite the fact that contractions sound natural in many contexts in English.
Instead of talking about what is proper or not, what I can say for sure is that "Loving you's no hassle" is not an impossible type of contraction. It is a type of contraction that can definitely be heard from proficient English speakers. So I don't think that you need to avoid using it.
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, 2002) gives the following linguistic description of the relevant context:
The clitic ['s] may attach to the last word of the subject, which does not have to be an NP.
("Chapter 18: Inflectional Morphology and Related Matters", §6.2. Clitic versions of auxiliary verbs, page 1616)
(The subject of your sentence is Loving you.)
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Is that talking about the clitic ['s] for the possessive, or a contraction of is? In this case, both are fine. "Loving you's easy." "The dog that bit you's teeth were very yellow." Although it doesn't sound great because of the nonstandard word "youse" (plural "you"). Commented Nov 21, 2022 at 4:06
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@CJDennis: The quoted sentence is only about the contraction of is, because it occurs in the context of the section about clitic forms of auxiliary verbs– herissonCommented Nov 21, 2022 at 4:09
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If a constituent is a verb's subject, doesn't that imply that it's a NP? Saying a subject "does not have to be an NP" suggests a restriction on what a NP may consist of.– Rosie FCommented Nov 21, 2022 at 8:16
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Also, you hafta distinguish between spelling, which is arbitrary and technological, and language, which is biological and evolved, and spoken. "Contraction" mostly refers to spelling. There are lotsa contractions that occur frequently in speech but normally don't in spelling. Largely because we don't know how they auta be spelled, given the junk heap of English spelling. Commented Nov 21, 2022 at 15:09
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1@RosieF: Many linguists argue that things like verb phrases, clauses, etc. can be subjects, and that they should not be analyzed as converted into NPs in that context (basically, the idea is that we should reserve the term "NP/noun phrase" to phrases headed by nouns, and verb phrases or clauses are not headed by nouns)– herissonCommented Nov 21, 2022 at 16:22
Yes, and it's been done. A quick Google of 'lyrics "loving you's"' shows:
- "Loving You's A Dirty Job (But Somebody's Gotta Do It)", on Bonnie Tyler's 1986 album "Secret Dreams and Forbidden Fire"
- Don Williams's "Loving You's Like Coming Home", I believe from 1990.
I do see cases of these written with "is" spelled out, and in some cases with the apostrophe just missing, but it appears the contracted form is how these were originally published.
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Ella Fitzgerald actually pronounces the is. In Sublimes' rendition it's, "Its summertime And the livins easy"– MazuraCommented Nov 22, 2022 at 0:46
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But you couldn't say, e.g. "Loving you's easier than loving him's".– RedSonjaCommented Nov 22, 2022 at 9:36
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1@RedSonja nor "I'm a faster runner than he's" nor "Is he a slow runner? Yes, he's" Commented Nov 22, 2022 at 16:36
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Poetry and Music is a lot more lax on contractions
Poetry, song lyrics, etc. often uses contractions to maintain rhyme and meter, even when the contraction would normally sound wrong to native speakers. You's is certainly not a contraction that I would recommend in day to day speech, but all those fancy contractions you hear Shakespeare using like shan’t, ‘twere, 'twon’t, 'tis, ha'n’t were not about being grammatically correct, but to force sentences to fit iambic pentameter. In poetry, contractions are not just words, but pronunciation keys to show the reader when to slur words together to keep the whole piece sounding correct.
So, considering the medium you are writing in, I'd say it's absolutely acceptable. But in most cases of formal, or even causal writing, this particular contraction would not read well since it's not a common part of any written vernacular dialect.
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