Mind your language
FOR goodness' sake! A Mr Dalzel-Job of Plockton (whose name combines the obsolete letter yogh and a Hebraic ele- ment in an interesting way that I haven't got time to go into) takes Mr Stephen Glover or The Spectator or both to task in the most intemperate terms in a letter to the editor for using the possessive form Max Hastings'.
I appeal for calm. James Howell (c.1594-1666), who is best known for his entertaining letters, Epistolae Ho-elianae, wrote in another work, Instructions for forreine travell, that Spanish is to be commended for its `freedom from Apostrophes which are the knots of a Language'.
I am inclined to agree. Of course, in Howell's time the apostrophe mark was not regularly used to indicate the singu- lar possessive, let alone the plural. When it was used it was meant to indi- cate the loss of a letter, usually e, which would formerly have been pronounced, as in `Jobbes teares', for example.
There was always a difficulty with what to do about words already ending in s. Many of these were proper names, and many of these proper names were of classical origin, which in their native usage would have formed the genitive by quite a different method of declen- sion. Moreover, when these classical names appeared in poetry (as they so often did), the indication of the geni- tive in the ordinary English manner would change their metrical value (e.g Aeneas's mother-in-law). So a conven- tion grew up of merely bunging an apostrophe onto the nominative form (e.g. Moses' horns).
In the plural, things began complicat- edly and ended arbitrarily. Quite often the early (17th-century) solution was to use an apostrophe where an e would appear before the s, even in the nomi- native, especially in with foreign words, as in folio's (for folioes) or, I suppose, potato's, perpetuated for another rea- son by the much derided greengrocer's accidence. The apostrophe with the genitive plural stuck, even though it never stood for any lost vowel.
Today, there are surprisingly few dif- ficulties with apostrophes in practice. Fowler's favourite puzzle was what to do with in The Times's' opinion. (This presupposed putting The Times in sin- gle inverted commas.) There are plenty of other little puzzles. What to do with the bell of St Paul's? St Paul's' bell? St Paul's's bell?
I'd say: use your ears, and if you refer in speech to 'Max Hastings' good looks', then write it so.
Dot Wordsworth
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