If your bosses’ boss is Jesus’s boss, for Jesus’ sake, whose boss’ son’s your boss?
Don’t answer that. Don’t even try to understand that. Lord knows I don’t. Just look at the apostrophes and, before giving in to the urge kick someone, ask yourself not what Jesus would do, not even what Jesus’s apostles would do, but: WWJAD—what would Jesus’s apostrophes do?
The answer, of course, is that Jesus was lucky enough to speak Aramaic, a language about which I know absolutely nothing and yet can say with one hundred percent certainty that it contained simpler rules for possessives.
The basic rule for making possessives is among the first things grade-schoolers learn about the English language and is one of the simplest concepts to grasp. To make a possessive, add an apostrophe and an “s.” Tiffany’s bike. Tyler’s puppy dog. Teacher’s Xanax.
For most plurals, just add the apostrophe and no “s.” The girls’ locker room, the boys’ attitudes.
Child’s play. Or so it would seem, until years later when the child who once wrote the simple story about Tiffany, Tyler, and Teacher decides to write a paper about Jesus’s teachings or Marx’s theories or the Bushes’ dynasty. Then this oh-so-simple concept instantly turns out to be a mess so ugly that the Chicago Manual of Style actually encourages readers to discard its own advice: “Since feelings on these matters sometimes run high, users of this manual may wish to modify or add to the exceptions” (a footnote thought by many to also appear at the end of the Ten Commandments).
Possessives start to get ugly when you begin dealing with words that end with “s.” Words that end with “x” and “z” confuse many people as well. And from here, possessives get even uglier, prompting the authors of style manuals to list dozens of special cases such as “Nouns the Same in Singular and Plural,” “Names Like ‘Euripides,’ ” “Nouns Plural in Form, Singular in Meaning,” and “Quasi Possessives.” The bad news, of course, is that the rules are so complex and arbitrary that the average person would rather become fluent in Jesus’s native Aramaic than learn them. But the good news, as we see so often in the world of the grammar snobs, is that the authorities all contradict each other, leaving you the option of often following your own best judgment.
For example, if you’re reading a book about the cultural contributions of Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Desi Arnaz, you’d see in the book: “Dickens’s, Marx’s, and Arnaz’s contributions.” (You’d probably also be listed on some kind of government watch list, right between Michael Moore and the Teletubbies, but that’s a different matter.) If you were reading about the same topic in a newspaper, you’d see the name Dickens drop an “s” while the others kept the extra “s”: “Dickens’, Marx’s, and Arnaz’s contributions.”
But both the book and the newspaper article would use the identical form when writing, “the bass’s mouth, the fox’s tail, and the buzz’s sound.” They would all get an apostrophe and an “s.”
That’s because, while the Associated Press agrees with Chicago on some possessive issues, it disagrees on others. The best news in all this is that, despite many people’s fear that words ending in “x” and “z” get special treatment, they don’t. AP and Chicago agree that, whether common noun or proper name, they just get the standard apostrophe plus “s.”
AP and Chicago also agree about common nouns ending in “s,” such as “boss.” These also get the standard apostrophe plus “s.” But no matter how big your boss’s Jesus complex, no matter how certain he is that he’s leading the meek to inherit the earth (I’m looking at you, Bill Gates), no matter how many loaves-and-fishes-style accounting “miracles” he employs in the annual company tax return (I’m looking at you, indicted former Enron execs), your boss is not Jesus—well, at least not according to the Associated Press.
The Associated Press parts ways with Chicago when it comes to proper names ending in “s.” For proper nouns, including Jesus, AP says, use only the apostrophe but no “s” to make them possessive.
This all means that, while Chicago thinks your boss deserves the same treatment as Jesus, the AP, and just about everyone but your boss disagree.
In itself that’s a minor disagreement—not too problematic for anyone except your boss. But as we’ve seen over and over, language authorities can’t stand to leave a relatively simple thing alone.
For example, the New York Times Style Guide, word columnist William Safire reports, has created a special rule for proper names ending in “s” that happen to belong to “ancients.”
“Almost all singular words ending in ‘s’ require a second ‘s’ as well as the apostrophe, with the ‘almost’ allowing exceptions for Jesus, Moses, Achilles and other ancients,” Safire writes.
What’s an “ancient”? They’re not too clear on that point. But I bet you wouldn’t get too far arguing, “Well, Bill Gates seems ancient to me.”
Chicago and AP don’t make this exception for ancients, though Chicago has another cruelly arbitrary rule for another unusual circumstance: “The possessive is formed without an additional ‘s’ for a name of two or more syllables that ends in an ‘eez’ sound. Euripides’ tragedies, the Ganges’ source, Xerxes’ armies.” But that’s just for proper names ending in this “eez” sound and not plain old nouns ending with this “eez” sound. So if you tend to write a lot of memos or letters mentioning Euripides, Xerxes, and the Ganges, you might want to make a note of that. I, on the other hand, have already forgotten it.
Most experts agree about what happens when a possessive of a singular word that ends with an “s” is followed by a word that begins with an “s”: You drop the “s” after the apostrophe: “the boss’s daughter” uses the standard rules of possessives, but “the boss’ son” is different just because “son” starts with an “s.” Another example: “the hostess’s podium,” but “the hostess’ stand.” And another: “the witness’s testimony,” but “the witness’ story.” The idea is that otherwise you have three “s” sounds lined up in a row, and that would be crazy.
This most often comes into play with “sake”: “for goodness’ sake,” “for Jesus’ sake.” But remember, “for heaven’s sake” still gets the extra “s” because we’re only talking about singulars that end in “s,” which “heaven” does not. So I suppose atheists can disregard this rule entirely.
That’s okay, because there are more possessives rules to sweat. For example, AP and Chicago agree that nouns that are plural in form but singular in meaning—such as “politics,” “economics,” “species,” and “the United States”—get only an apostrophe and no extra “s.”
But, yea, though you walk through valley of the shadow of deathly difficult possessives, you need fear no evil, says the good book the Chicago Manual of Style:
“ ‘An alternative practice.’ Those uncomfortable with the rules, exceptions, and options outlined above may prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive ‘s’ on all words ending in ‘s’—hence ‘Dylan Thomas’ poetry,’ ‘Maria Callas’ singing,’ and ‘that business’ main concern.”
Hallelujah.