John in Tucson, Arizona, remembers his grandfather from Sharon, Vermont, saying possessives such as hisn, hern, yourn, and ourn, as in Those cattle are hisn or That house is hern. These archaic forms go back to Middle English, shaped by analogy with...
If you have two dogs that share a toy, do you write that as my dogs’ toy or my dogs’s toy? It’s one of those things to which we can come up with a logical answer, but then later we’ll catch ourselves doing a different...
A young woman in Charleston, South Carolina, owns a boa constrictor named Wayne, and wonders if it’s correct to say that her father isn’t a fan of Wayne’s. Such double possessives are fine, and have been in use for centuries. This...
Bathroom walls, missing graffiti, and social media. Where have all the cute quips on bathroom stalls gone? We wonder about the apparent decline of restroom graffiti. Are people saving their witticisms for Twitter and Facebook? And: If...
There’s no definite rule for putting the apostrophe “s” after names like Liz or Alex when talking about Liz’s wedding or Alex’s school, but we know for certain that most people say, and write out, the possessive...
Why do we turn proper nouns, like JC Penney or Kroger, into possessives, as in, Penny’s or Kroger’s? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Plural Business Names” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is...
