On his website, Verbivore.com, language expert and author Richard Lederer gives us some chilling insight into his childhood that may also serve as important research into the psychological development of grammar fiends.
“I was the kind of child who, almost as soon as he could talk, saw a butterfly and cooed, ‘Oh, goody. A butterfly will flutter by,’ ” Lederer writes. “Even as a high-school student, I knew that Elvis Presley, born three years before me, would become immortal because I saw that ‘Elvis Lives’ is a two-word anagram.” Further, Lederer reports that he started out in college as a pre-med major but soon realized he was reading chemistry texts “for their literary value.”
Is Lederer a grammar snob? I don’t know. I didn’t read any further. Between the Hannibal the Cannibal–style anagrams, the Buffalo Bill–style preoccupation with butterflies, and the desire to work with cadavers, these few sentences were enough to give me nightmares of Lederer eating my liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Add to that the fact that, at the very website on which Lederer, author of The Cunning Linguist, brags about enjoying plays on words, there’s a note that the site itself was “erected May 1, 1996.”
So hopefully you can see why I never got far enough to determine whether he’s a serial meanie or just a harmless word perv.
That’s okay. As much as we might believe that hard-core language enthusiasts are the only ones who hold answers to some of our everyday language questions, the truth is that the “experts” are often as baffled as the rest of us.
For example, a lot of people, myself included, have wondered whether it’s correct to say, “A friend of Dick’s,” or “A friend of Dick.” People love to pretend that they know the answer to this, but the truth is that no amount of cooing or fluttering by will reveal a clear answer. The experts simply don’t know.
Sure, the first one, “A friend of Dick’s,” is a redundancy. The “of” means the same thing as the apostrophe and “s.” That’s why it’s labeled a “double possessive.” But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, say the authors of the Chicago Manual of Style:
“The possessive form may be preceded by ‘of’ where ‘one of several’ is implied. ‘A friend of Dick’s’ and ‘a friend of his’ are equally acceptable.”
(That’s right. I got “Dick” not by getting overly familiar with Richard Lederer but straight out of the Chicago Manual of Style. So when I paraphrase this grammar lesson by saying, “A friend of Dick’s is a friend of Dick,” you can’t pin anything on me.)
Sometimes this double possessive is actually better than the alternative because it eliminates confusion. An example from Garner’s Modern American Usage shows us that “a bone of the dog” sounds more like part of the dog’s body than like something he gnaws on and buries in the yard. “A bone of the dog’s” sounds more like a soup bone someone happened to give the dog. Of course, opting for a different construction is often the best way to go: “The dog’s bone.” (Again, not my example.)
Some grammar snobs, however, refuse to accept this, even if you show it to them in print. They will still insist that “a friend of Dick” is correct and “a friend of Dick’s” is incorrect. Here’s how to settle their hash: Try replacing “Dick” and “Dick’s” with pronouns. It becomes immediately clear that the possessive pronoun “his” is better than the non–possessive pronoun “him.” That is, “a friend of his,” the equivalent of “a friend of Dick’s,” is clearly better than “a friend of him,” which is the equivalent of “a friend of Dick.” That’s true even though “a friend of his” is clearly a double possessive. Ditto for “a friend of mine,” which anyone would prefer to “a friend of me.”
Enter the Associated Press, which throws a bizarre little rule into the mix:
“Two conditions must apply for a double possessive—a phrase such as ‘a friend of John’s’—to occur: 1. The word after ‘of’ must refer to an animate object, and 2. The word before ‘of’ must involve only a portion of the animate object’s possessions.”
I think this is AP’s way of trying to explain why “a member of the church” is better than “a member of the church’s” and why “the followers of Reverend Moon” is better than “the followers of Reverend Moon’s.” But did we really need a rule to tell us this?
Moving on to our second possessive issue, consider the following two choices from the Chicago Manual of Style:
“We liked Randy’s singing,” and “We liked Randy singing.” (Again, not—repeat not—my examples.)
The first is called a possessive with gerund, the gerund being the verb ending in “-ing.” Some people try to argue that only one of these two approaches is correct. But, as you’ll see in chapter 40, bona fide, real-life, doctorates-and-all grammarians can’t figure this one out. So you’re free to use either.
When comparing, “I disapprove of Randy’s lying to the police,” and “I disapprove of Randy lying to the police,” there’s a slight difference in emphasis. The first example says, technically, that what you disapproved of was lying. The second says, technically, that you disapproved of Randy. The ear usually takes care of these nuances for us without our having to stop and think about it (or, if you prefer no possessive, without us having to stop and think about it).
Moving on to the third and final possessive issue covered in this chapter, consider this sentence I just made up: “Teachers unions fight for workers’ compensation.”
Have you noticed in your local newspaper the term “teachers union” without the apostrophe required to make it “teachers’ union”? Did you wonder whether perhaps the printing press had broken or that you were going insane?
Newspapers in recent years have found a little loophole in the possessives rule. In a term like “teachers union,” the word “teachers” can be considered a possessive or it can also be considered an adjective of sorts. (The books call these “genitive” and “attributive” forms.) Newspapers have used this as a blank check to drop the apostrophes in a lot of terms they use regularly. The problem is, they’re making up the rules as they go along and not telling us what they are. “Teachers college” is listed in the AP Stylebook as having no apostrophe, where as “workers’ compensation” has one.
If they can plead that it’s all a matter of interpretation, so can you. Or you can go the even easier route laid out in the Chicago Manual, which is to always keep the apostrophe except in proper names, such as Publishers Weekly, and in cases where it’s obvious that no possession is implied, such as “a housewares sale.”
These written rules are at best self-evident and at worst ridiculous. So it’s a good thing we didn’t invest too much time reading the works of grammar snobs, word pervs, or cunning linguists to find answers about Dick, Randy, or the bone of the dog.