Using Double Possessives

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is AJ from beautiful Charleston, South Carolina.

Charleston! Beautiful Charleston, South Carolina.

Lovely. I would agree. Welcome to the show, AJ.

Hi. How can we help?

So, here’s the background to my question. My dad and I live together, and we were having a conversation about how I have a boa constrictor as a pet.

You do? Yeah.

Is his name Julia Squeezer? His name is Wayne.

His name is Wayne? Why did you name your boa constrictor?

Because it’s Wayne’s World. It’s excellent.

Is that why you named him Wayne?

Well, it’s actually a reference to a musical that my friends and I loved when we were kids.

Oh, really? Okay, a musical.

So someone asked my dad, oh, how do you feel about that? And he said, well, I’m not a big fan of Wayne.

And for some reason, that was the thing that got me thinking that usually don’t hear someone say I’m a fan of him. It’s usually I’m a fan of his.

But when it’s the person’s name, it’s usually singular and not possessive. So I was just wondering what the usage is on that and what’s more correct, because I’ve not been able to figure it out on the Internet.

Okay. And so you feel like a fan of Wayne’s is more correct than a fan of Wayne?

Well, it just doesn’t sound as like when it’s a question of friendship or fandom, I feel like you would more belong to them. So the possessive apostrophe S would be more correct.

But then also there’s the of way, so that already implies the possessive and the double possessive is wrong or which one you would think was correct.

Yeah, a lot of people have suggested that there’s something wrong with the double possessive or the double genitive, as we call it, that it’s redundant or that it’s actually too possessive.

But this construction has been around since Middle English. It’s been widely used by lots and lots of people. There’s nothing grammatically incorrect about it.

And in fact, it’s sometimes useful because if you say he found a bone of the dogs, that’s different from saying he found a bone of the dog, right? It’s two different things.

Yeah, that’s true. The bone of the snake.

But the word fan is problematic here, I think. There’s a question of directionality with fan.

It suggests a one-way kind of action, whereas, for example, if you replace fan with friend, friendness is mutual. It works both directions, and fan tends to work one direction, which may throw us some confusion.

Yeah, I think to be a fan of it just seems like a special case where that’s almost like a verb itself. Like, I admire Wayne, or I’m a fan of Wayne.

Another way of looking at this, AJ, is you probably wouldn’t have a problem if you said Wayne is a friend of mine. And yet with of and mine, we are still talking about a double possessive there.

We just simply haven’t done a proper noun with the apostrophe S to express that second possessive.

Yeah. So it’s really interesting. But either construction actually works.

You can say a fan of Wayne or a fan of Wayne’s. You will often find when you look at written descriptions of oral language, you will often find that people do have to clarify after they say that, though they have to indicate what they mean if there’s any doubt.

So it sounds like what we’re saying is that either one of your constructions is correct. We just can’t figure out why your dad doesn’t like the snake.

Yeah, I’m a fan of Wayne’s. Yeah, that’s the bigger problem here.

Send us some pictures of Wayne, all right? Can we put them on social media? Show the world Wayne and his coolness?

Yes. All right.

AJ, thank you so much for your call, all right? Thank you so much, Dan. I’m a big fan of you all.

Take care. Say hello to Wayne.

Great. You’re a fan of ours. Is that what you said?

Bye-bye. Nice. Bye-bye.

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