This little syntactic quirk always gives me pause, but I never really thought about it until this morning because everyone I talked to did it. This is the formulation: $personal_possessive_article $software_product. So people refer to "my Outlook" or "my Internet Explorer" or "my sed". Okay, it's never sed(1). I don't know if that's telling or not.

My friends never use this formula unless, perhaps, they do feel some responsibility for the project. Even in that case I don't think I've heard it from (what I adjudge to be) the cognoscenti. I don't think these people who use this construction would apply it to other mass produced copies of something: "my 'Dark Side of the Moon'". "my The Catcher in the Rye".

Oh well.