“My friends and I are now driving to my hometown. This is our second longest summer vacation since we left our university and we have enjoyed every single minute of it.”
Should we say “every single minute of its” instead? Because I think we need a possessive pronoun here (its) to replace the already mentioned “summer vacation”. It’s just like when we say “the books of mine”, “the computer of yours”.
What makes me even more surprised here is the fact that I googled the phrase “every single minute of it” and it appears EVERYWHERE which means it’s a very popular phrase. I continued to google “every single minute of its” and guess what, NOONE uses that! I’m really confused!
However, I don’t really consider Google search results to be a reliable source. I want to hear your opinion on this, between the two phrases, which is more grammatically correct?
You don’t need a possessive pronoun (nothing is possessed by the vacation). You need an objective personal pronoun to use instead of ‘vacation’ - you are talking about one particular summer vacation, so you need the singular form ‘it’.
Although I think your explanation makes sense, I’ve noticed that some of your examples does have count noun after “of” (day, cake, vacation). Does it make any difference?