Q. The following sentences were written by a student. “The three of us went to the Rangers’ hockey game. The leprechaun is the Celtics’ mascot.” Are apostrophes needed or do the sentences contain attributive nouns?
A. In these cases, the attributive might be more conventional, but the possessive is not wrong, and I would hate to discourage a student’s correct use of apostrophes. I’d give her a gold star, along with an explanation of the alternative styling as attributives. (For a more detailed explanation and examples, see CMOS 7.27.)
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. The information posted on the Possessives and Attributives web page comes close to answering my question, but I would appreciate a more detailed explanation: Did we have dinner at the Smiths or at the Smiths’? I am tempted to omit the apostrophe if I consider the preposition at equivalent to German bei + dative plural, French chez, Italian da, etc. But if “at the Smiths’” is shorthand for “at the Smiths’ house,” perhaps I need an apostrophe. Is Smiths functioning as a genitive or an attributive adjective? What if, instead of Smiths, I refer to a group of people (residents, occupants) by some other word, e.g., We had dinner at the neighbors, Canadians, etc.?
A. Throwing a dinner “at the Smiths” works if you’re describing a food fight, but if you are at the Smiths’ (or the neighbors’ or the Canadians’), you are at the Smiths’ (or the neighbors’ or the Canadians’) place, and, as you suggest, the implied possession requires an apostrophe.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. A friend and I were looking at a poster that read “guys apartment.” I believe
it should read “guys’ apartment.” She claims that it should
read “guys’s apartment” and that the CMOS specifically gives the example of “guys’s” to make “guys”
possessive. I looked through every section on possessives and did not find the word “guys’s”
or any rule that would make this correct. Some people say “you guys’s apartment”—did
I overlook the word “guys’s” as used in the attributive
position? (I don’t think I did.)
A. “Guys’s” is acceptable in the way that “youse
guys” is acceptable; that is, neither is yet recognized as standard prose, and if your friend can find
it in CMOS, I’ll eat my hat. Plural nouns that end in s (like “guys”) don’t add another s to form the possessive, e.g., the students’ lounge. “Guys’
apartment” is the standard spelling. If you want to make “guys”
attributive, you can get away without the apostrophe, but you might test the idea with a plural noun that doesn’t
end in s to see whether the attributive actually works: I doubt you’d write “the women
apartment,” so you shouldn’t write “the guys apartment”
either. And shame on your friend. It must make you wonder what else she’s capable of.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I somewhat often find myself struggling to find a grammatical construct for adding information about a possessive, particularly
where the additional information is nonsubstantive enough that I don’t want to dedicate an entire sentence
to presenting it. An example is: “The school’s, which is across the street, bell
rings at three o’clock.” I expect that the answer is to change my phrasing. If
anyone can guide me out of this desperate quandary, I’m quite certain that it’s
my heroes at the CMOS.
A. Natch, with one hand tied behind my back: e.g., The bell rings at three at the school across the street. When a possessive
gets ugly, give it up.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. How does one make the following names possessive (and all first names that end in “s”)? James, Iris.
Q. My editor keeps correcting my possessive. Which is correct? (One person owns the house but several people live there.) We
went to the Kerr’s or We went to the Kerrs’ or We went to the Kerrs. I used the
first one and she says it’s wrong. Thank you so much.
A. Your editor is right. The Kerr family consists of more than one person, so for starters they need to be in the plural: Kerrs.
This is logical—we add an s to most nouns to make them plural (one cat, two cats; one Kerr, two Kerrs).
Then, to make it possessive, you add the apostrophe: Kerrs’. If, on the other hand, Mary Kerr owns the
place and has unrelated roommates, then you are stuck with writing “We went to Mary Kerr’s”
(or “We went to Mary’s”). Since we would not refer to Mary
as “the Kerr,” we wouldn’t refer to her house as “the
Kerr’s house.”
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. My fourteen-year-old stepson claims that the newest version of Microsoft Word “corrects”
the contraction “it’s” by removing the apostrophe. He also
claims that they “looked it up” online and that the rule has been changed so that
neither the contraction nor the possessive has an apostrophe. I explained to him that the contraction and possessive of “its”
may be one of the most difficult rules for people to learn because many people want to believe there should be an apostrophe
for the possessive form. Are you aware of a so-called change? I never trust software and I am trying to convince him that
he should not trust it either. Thank you for your time.
A. Your guy is pulling your leg. In fact, the default settings of the latest version of Word automatically correct in exactly
the opposite direction, fully supporting the apostrophe s in “it’s”:
it snot —> it’s not
it’ snot —> it’s not
it;s —> it’s
Remind your stepson that a person can find a mountain of misinformation online, and that he needs to learn how to judge the
source. And just in case the little rascal thinks you’re easily duped, remind him that you can double check his online finds, as well (QED). Finally, invite him to write to us with his questions.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Which is correct: “so and so, four months pregnant” or “so
and so, four months’ pregnant”?
A. Write “four months pregnant”—that is, without the apostrophe.
The expression is analogous to expressions like “three hours late” and “five
feet high.” In such cases, the expression of time or distance is simply modifying the adjective that
follows. The apostrophe is reserved for the genitive case. The phrase “four months’
pregnancy” is an example of the genitive case because it can be rewritten with “of”:
pregnancy of four months.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. When using a pronoun to replace the first noun when two nouns show possession of one item, which case should the pronoun
be? For example, in the sentence “I’m going to my uncle and aunt’s
house,” “uncle” is not in the possessive case. So which
case should the pronoun be? “I’m going to him and my aunt’s
house”? “I’m going to he and my aunt’s
house”? Or, “I’m going to his and my aunt’s
house”? And, if the answer is “his,” how do you reconcile
that the pronoun is not agreeing with the noun it replaces in gender, number, and case? And what is correct if the pronoun
replaces the second noun? “Megan’s and his room”? Or “Megan
and his room”?
A. The trick of showing joint possession with a single apostrophe s is possible only with two items that can take an apostrophe s. Hence a car owned by John and Jim can be expressed as “John and Jim’s car.”
This is clearly a convenient shorthand—helped out by the fact that, normally, you can assume readers
will not think that you’re writing about John, on one hand, and Jim’s car, on
the other. Most pronouns do not form the possessive with an apostrophe s. “One” becomes “one’s,”
but “he” becomes “his” and “I”
becomes “my.” Therefore you generally cannot use shortcuts in cases of joint possession
involving a pronoun. You must make both owners possessive:
his and my aunt’s house
Megan’s and his room
You can reconcile the first as equivalent to “my uncle and aunt’s house”
by remembering that the apostrophe s after “aunt” also applies to “uncle”;
“his” is technically replacing “uncle’s”
not “uncle.”
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. A friend of John or a friend of John’s? I’ve heard that both are correct. A friend
tossed the famous ambiguity at me this way: “A student of Einstein.” Unless it’s
Einstein’s, then it might be taken to mean a student who is working on Einstein.
A. It is best, and, what is more, perfectly idiomatic, to use the double genitive when “one of So-and-so’s”
is what you have in mind:
a student of his (that is, one of his students)
a student of Einstein’s (that is, one of Einstein’s students)
Then you have the liberty of writing “a student of Einstein” to mean by contrast
either someone who is working on the great theoretical physicist as a scholarly subject or, more broadly, someone who is a
close observer of Einstein and his work.
Fowler’s notes in its third edition that such phrases as “a student of his” are illogical—one
of the “freaks of idiom” (pp. 542–43). In any case, your
friend’s “student of Einstein” example is an excellent refutation
of those who would avoid the apostrophe s at all costs.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]