Follett is the one guide I don’t have. However, the contemporaneous (1965) The Careful Writer, by Theodore Bernstein, the notoriously conservative head copy editor for The New York Times, has an enlightening discourse on it.
Bernstein was so conservative that my rule of thumb when reading him is simple. If he allowed something then, it is completely acceptable today with no qualifications. If he disallowed something, find another source that is more modern to discover today’s conventions. I mean, this is a man who wouldn’t allow the word balding, because baldish was more descriptive.
So I have to admit that at some point before my birth, this distinction was made. It was probably gone by 1965, if Bernstein was giving up on the point, although no doubt most older teachers wouldn’t have changed their lesson plans for years. Today it would be bizarre to cavil at “the table’s top,” which is an example he doesn’t like. Some newspapers still dislike constructions like Ontario’s Prime Minister, but not because of the genitive. Rather because it leads to noun strings: Ontario’s Prime Minister John Middlename Smyth’s former brother-in-law’s dentist’s CPA announced today… which are nevertheless extremely common.
Use the simple genitive. Any time you like. Don’t worry about it.
However, I was wrong about one thing: according to Wikipedia, this use of the “his genitive” form enjoyed popularity in the period between 1680 and 1700, and not among “early Modern English” writers as I wrote.
I would have written:
Though many think the Doors hinge on the power of Morrison’s voice, Manzarek’s, Densmore’s, and Krieger’s musicianship were instrumental to their success.
On a related note, our primary client’s style manual (now how would the OP’s teacher handle an the organization’s possessive?) strongly prefers no possessive acronyms. Lots of minor sentence rewriting on that front, though most are fairly easy (e.g., the success of the UN’s programmes is due to… --> the success of UN programmes is due to…).
I’ve never known the possessive 's to be limited to animate nouns. I have never heard this rule before, and I thought I’d heard all the grammar superstitions that are taught as “proper English” in the classroom. Even Fowler, a grammarian’s grammarian, used the possessive case with inanimate nouns in his “King’s English” freely in 1908:
Who comes up with such nonsense? I mean, just look at a line of Shakespeare: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or the first line of the US national anthem or the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
I was actually, at one point, taught almost the exact opposite. I was told that, in truly formal prose, a proper noun could not take the possessive 's, and instead the construction ____ of ____ was used.
I remember this only because I though of it as the French method of possession, as that is the standard method in that language for all possessives.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage addresses this odd belief:
<<Genitive with inanimate nouns. Look at this list of phrases:
the nation’s capital
a week’s pay
a dollar’s worth
a stone’s throw
the Hundred Years’ War
land’s end
on a winter’s night
In each of the phrases the noun in the possessive case stands for something inanimate. One of the curious things about these constructions is that a considerable number of 19th-century grammarians reasoned themselves into believing that they did not exist or were wrong. Some 20th-century commentators - Follett 1966, for instance - still think they are wrong. And why? Because you are not supposed to be able to attribute possession to something inanimate.
The argument is a case of fooling oneself with one’s own terminology. After the 18th-century grammarians began to refer to the genitive case as the possessive case, grammarians and other commentators got it into their heads that the only use of the case was to show possession. But not one of the examples in the list is a possessive genitive; they are subjective or objective or descriptive genitives . . . . And they are all perfectly standard.>>
I worked with a technical editor that used this piece of incorrect thought as she went through my work. Drove me nuts, it did. “You’re personifying stuff - our style guide doesn’t allow that.” Lady, your style guide is crap and leads to torturous syntax and unclear writing. Of course the car can “have” wheels or the book pages or whatever, and to think otherwise is screwy.
It seems to me that, even if the idea that an inanimate object couldn’t take the possessive were true (which I think we’ve seen it isn’t), example 2 would still be wrong. “The doors hinge” is still possessive, it’s just arbitrarily spelled differently.
