[ad_1]
Whatever Vice President Kamala Harris’s reason for choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate, it probably wasn’t a desire to stir up a debate about apostrophes. But it doesn’t take much to get grammar nerds excited.
“The lower the stakes, the bigger the fight,” said Ron Voloshun, a California-based creative director and digital marketer who jumped into the fray on social media less than an hour after Harris selected Walz last week, offering his take on possessive nouns.
The Associated Press Stylebook says to “use an apostrophe only” for singular proper names ending in the letter s: Dickens’ novels, the labors of Hercules, the life of Jesus. But not everyone agrees.
The debate about proper names ending in s began soon after President Joe Biden cleared the way for Harris last month. Is it Harris’s or Harris’s? But Walz’s choice of his s-like-s surname really kicked it up a notch, said Benjamin Dreyer, a retired copy chief at Random House and author of “Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.”
Dreier was bombarded with questions within minutes of the announcement, which came while he was at the dentist.
He said, “I thought, ‘OK, everybody calm down. I’ll come home in a little bit and go to my desk.'”
While there is widespread agreement that Walz’s decision is correct, confusion remains over the decision in Harris v. Harris. Dreier’s decision? Add the ‘s.’
“It’s simple to set ‘S,’ and then you can take your valuable brain cells and apply them to more important things,” he said.
Voloshun expressed a similar opinion on the social platform X, where apostrophes are being thrown around like hand grenades. He argued, “The rule is simple: if you say S, spell the S correctly.”
That puts them on the same side as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal — and .
Amanda Barrett, the organization’s vice president for news standards and inclusion, said that while the style has evolved on a number of fronts over the years, there are no immediate plans to change the guidelines regarding possessive words.
“This is a long-standing policy. It has served us well, and we haven’t seen any real need to change it,” he said. “We know that conversations are ongoing and that people make different choices when it comes to grammar, and that’s all fine. Everyone makes the choice that works best for them.”
Timothy Pulju, a senior lecturer in linguistics at Dartmouth College, said that until the 17th or 18th century, possessives of proper names ending in the letter s — such as Jesus or Moses — were often just names, with no apostrophe or an extra s. Eventually, the apostrophe was added to indicate the possessive, though the pronunciation remained the same.
He said, “It became a kind of standard that I was taught and that I followed, although looking back I don’t think it was a great standard.”
That’s because linguists view writing as a representation of speech, and speech has changed since then. Pulju said he expects the ‘s’ form to eventually become dominant. But for now, he — along with the Merriam-Webster dictionary — says either way is acceptable.
“As long as people are communicating successfully, we say the language is doing what it’s supposed to do,” he said. “If you can read it the way it’s written, it seems to be working for people. They’re not getting confused about which running mate is Tim Walz.”
If she wins in November, Harris will become the third U.S. president whose last name ends in S and the first since Rutherford B. Hayes, who was elected in 1876 — 130 years before the founding of Twitter — and was spared a social media frenzy over the apostrophe. Harris is the first candidate with such a puzzling last name since 1984, when Democrat Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush.
Dukakis, now 90, said in a phone interview Monday that he didn’t recall any such discussions taking place when he was the nominee. But he agrees.
He said, “It seems to me it would be the ‘s,’ the ‘apostrophe,’ and that’s it.”
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign has yet to take a clear stance. A press release issued by her New Hampshire team on Monday touted “Harris’s positive outlook,” a day after her national press office wrote about “Harris’s seventh visit to Nevada.”
This article is generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
[ad_2]
