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Is it possible to use general "is" contractions with regular nouns? Like "The car's white", or "everyone I know's cool". It seems like this could be a logical extensions of the normal rules of contractions, and informally online I find myself typing these out.

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Yes, this is totally grammatical and is often seen/heard. Here is a quote from Writer's Digest on the topic:

Whether it’s a pronoun, plain noun or proper noun, it is acceptable to tack the apostrophe-s onto the end of nouns to replace “is.” There are no rules against it. In fact, if you search in stylebooks, online grammar sources and the like, there really isn’t any information floating around on this specific use of the apostrophe-s (‘s)[...]

To make sure something wasn’t slipping past me, I contacted my fellow grammarian Bill Walsh, copy chief at The Washington Post and author of The Elephants of Style (McGraw-Hill) and asked him about this rule.

“If Brian’s a baseball fan, then Brian’s a baseball fan,” Walsh says. “Aside from questions of formality, the only stumbling block might be if your proper noun ends in s—Washington’s a great town, but Paris … Paris just ‘is.'”

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