Communicator (communicator) wrote,
Communicator
communicator

Possession Obsession

I received a copy of 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' for Christmas. I found it well written, readable, and the punctuation advice to be mild and traditional. Nothing wrong with that.

There was one section in the chapter on the apostrophe that got on my nerves though(*). In particular because I can just imagine future pedants taking it as gospel and criticising all other styles.

The question is the old conundrum: how do you add a possessive to a proper noun which ends in 's'? For example how do you punctuate Miles' transporter room or Legolas's weapon'?

What I do is consult the pronunciation. If I pronounce the end of the word as 'sez'(Legolasez weapon) then I write s's. If I pronounce the end of the word with just a 'z' or 's' (Milez transporter, Tynus face)then I write s'.

However what this book recommends is that we should always (excepting a few archaic uses) punctuate possessives as follows

Jimmy Connors's forehand

Yuck! I hope this doesn't catch on. Much more importantly I hope that people don't start pronouncing possessives like that.

What do you think?

---

(*) This reminds me of the line from The Importance of Being Earnest: 'The chapter on the fall of the rupee you may omit; it is somewhat too sensational'
Subscribe

  • Phew what a scorcher

    I see Gove has backed down on climate change and it's back in the curriculum again.

  • GCSE Computer Science

    My book is now for sale

  • LJ Settings

    At the moment I have set up this journal so that only friends can comment. I hate doing this, but I was just getting too much Russian spam.

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Comments allowed for friends only

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic
  • 8 comments