Not sure why, but this has been bugging me immensely lately here! So I decided to annoy everyone by reminding us all how to use a terminal “s”.
When a word ends in apostrophe-s, “X’s”, it is possessive (with one little exception). Thus “researcher’s” means “belonging/belongs to (a) researcher” and “design’s” means "belonging/belongs to (a) design, and “Joe’s” means “belonging/belongs to Joe”.
The exception is the pesky little word “it’s”, which is a contraction of “it is”.
Which leads back to the above examples; technically “researcher’s” could mean “researcher is”, “design’s” could mean “design is”, and “Joe’s” could mean “Joe is”, but those are almost never used except in conversation, e.g. “Joe’s gone home”.
For a plural, the final “s” doesn’t get an apostrophe; thus more than one researcher is “researchers”, more than one design is “designs”, and more than one Joe is a nuisance and is written “Joes”, e.g. “There are three Joes in my biology class” (which, if “Joe” is used as slang, could be written “There are three joes in my biology class”).
So things like “The researcher’s went out to a bar after work” makes no sense; it needs an object after “researcher’s”, e.g. “The researcher’s wife went out to a bar after work”; or “The design’s were lost” makes no sense for the same reason, though “The design’s units were lost” works (or even “The design’s unit’s specification was lost”).
Last, there’s the s-apostrophe, Xs’, construction, which denotes something belonging to a plural word, e.g. “The researchers’ design was lost”.
Anyway, just me thinking that as we should try to be precise in presenting ideas w should aim to be precise in the language we use.
One I have messed up on is lens. The plural is lenses, which makes me want to use lense as the singular, which it is not.
Then, you are faced with possessive and plural of Moses and Jesus. If the The children of people named Moses formed a club, would it be the Moseses’ Kids’ Club?
“Its” is a word in its own right, like “his”, “hers”, “yours” or “theirs”, rather than a possessive extension. It never had an apostrophe, so wasn’t ‘trumped’.
I actually came across “He’sn’t” in a really old piece of literature from back before scholars started imposing rules on the language – it took me a bit to figure out what that was supposed to be!
Adding to the previous reply: they’re all contractions. The usual possessive " 's " was originally a contraction of an Old English genitive ending, “-es”.
Names ending in s don’t have a clear rule. The most common approach seems to be to use " ‘s " for most names but just " ’ " for ancient names. Thus, it’s "Jesus’ disciples" but “Harris’s campaign”.
And then that still leaves the question of diction when one is reading aloud. Should we pronounce it as “Jesuses disciples” or “Jesus disciples” and just let context do all the work?
One thing I’ve learned by listening to linguist John McWhorter is that scholars will attempt to impose their rules in vain (at least in the long run). Languages always have and always will continue to change. And one of the biggest drivers of change is laziness (both verbal and literary). The vikings didn’t bother learning all the unique word plurals that the English were using - so they just started putting an ‘s’ on the end of stuff to pluralize things. The unique leftovers that we still have today (like children instead of childs) are just the few words that survived that practice. So you can thank their laziness for the fact that what used to be the rule for plurals are now the exceptions.
And it’s probably just a matter of time before ‘and’ turns into something shorter too since we all say things like “mom 'n dad” and nobody ever says “mom and dad” unless they’re making some strange emphasis. We even see that laziness taking hold in the scale of a single lived human lifetime. I’m already often writing “thru” on the whiteboard rather than troubling with “through” - and that’s in a teaching context! (and when’s the last time you ever saw “through” spelled out on road signage?)
In short - spoken language is always the driver for written language, despite the efforts of recent centuries and higher literacy rates that have caused us to attempt to nail things down a bit more.
That would be American, not English. Two Nations divided by single language. I will admit that some coloquialisms have crossed the pond but not that one.
Hence the smiley face. It is interesting how southern usage always uses it as plural, but those from other lands up north sometimes misuse it as singular. When a Southerner tells an individual “Y’all take care,” it refers to the person and their extended relations. But, as Merv said, language changes. In school, we were taught that “nauseated” meant you were feeling nausea, whereas “nauseous “ meant it caused one to be nauseated. Thus when someone said “I am nauseous “ they were saying that they induced nausea in others. Misuse has become so common, that now they are both defined as the state of being nauseated.
