Style guides are not what I go by. It’s more about how people say it. People say “Jesus’ name” a lot, but I never hear anyone refer to “Chris’ house”–it’s always “Chris’s house.”
Or, to spell out the pronounciation, it’s often “JEE-zuss (or JEE-zuhzz) NAEM”, but always “KRISS-uhzz HOUSS.” I’ve never heard “KRISS HOUSS” or “KRISS HOUZZ”
When it gets weird is that I’ve heard “KAN-diss HOUS” before, but writing "Candice’ " doesn’t really work. So I’m stuck writing “Candice’s” even when transcribing. But I can maybe write Markus’ house.
It seems the main thing is whether or not the last syllable is accented. If it is, then you always get the extra syllable when making it possessive. But when it’s completely unaccented, the extra syllable is sometimes–but not always–left out.
When not transcribing, I go with ‘s except with old fixed uses like "Jesus’ Name," because “Jesus’s name” “sounds” wrong to me.
But “Chris’ house” is strictly about a spelling convention. The second s-sound is implied, and you say it the same way for either style - “Kriss-uhzz.”
As long as we loose the hounds on those folks I’m happy.
Agreed.
Although nowadays a lot of people like to flaunt their acts of flouting. Which is probably driving some of the confusion / blending of the terms.
Actually they’re all essentially the same process IMO. The public at large hears and speaks far more than they read or write. That’s always been true.
What has changed is that prior to, say, 20 years ago very few people wrote much that had any audience reach. And those who did were professionals whose work was edited and proofread by professionals. So the misunderstandings and mis-hearings of the great mass of non-professional writers were never committed to text, much less broadcast to the world.
The last 20 years have witnessed a vast democratization of who’s (whose? Gah!!) words are committed to text and read by the masses. I predict that in general homophones and homonyms will converge in spelling and/or meaning or be driven out of the language. Meanwhile spelling becomes less standardized and more phonetically folk-driven. As it was in the e.g. 1600s when everybody who could write (a small minority) chose their own spelling of many words.
Meh. Yeah, it grinds on me a little, but I’ve seen hyperliterate people make this mistake. Same with its/it’s. I full well know the difference but when typing spontaneously one may come in place of the other. “Loose” for “lose,” though, really irks me.
Same here. It’s one that I’m constantly correcting in my college students’ essays.
You know, I’m a bit of a stickler for decent grammar and usage, but “whom” is one that I would probably be happy to let go, mainly because so many people, even educated people, use it so badly.
It seems, in some people’s writing, to be used not as an object pronoun but as a more formal or “educated” version of “who.” I’ve seen sentences in student essays like, “Wilson, whom was the president during World War I…”
Thank you. I started with “whose”, but then realized I really needed a plural form of “whose” (whoses?). Then got derailed.
Bob, who’s tall and bald, said …
Bob, whose car is red, said …
So far so easy.
But
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice each separately write stuff. Some of the stuff from some of those people gets published. So …
The group of people [insert word here] stuff got published.
The group is a plural item, the stuff is possessed by only some members of the group, and the stuff is plural too. But the real point of the sentence is to differentiate between which group members got published, not their stuff that got published.
I wrote
Clearly the better move would been to restructure the sentence altogether.
I know just enough about correctly using “whom” to think maybe you’re not pulling my leg. I know it sounds nice in my sentence. Not that my it-sounds-nice intuition is all that reliable.
That was exactly my first thought, but you beat me to it, curse you!!
“Loose the nut!” is grammatically correct (if somewhat archaic) as a sort of battle cry in the defense of home and castle, akin to “release the hounds!”, if instead of hounds you keep a homicidal maniac in the dungeon for deployment in emergencies.
Actually, your first distinction covers it. “Whose” is the appropriate word here. It’s quite happy to function as a plural possessive. More accurately, in terms of your intent that “the real point of the sentence is to differentiate between which group members got published, not their stuff that got published”, “whose” is technically used here as a plural determiner.
Language evolution is weird. The French express negation with the word for “step” (actually, in textbook French you use a negation that sounds like a normal IndoEuropean negation before the verb and the word for step after the noun - but people are dropping the “before verb” negation more and more these days). Jespersen's Cycle - Wikipedia - having an preposition become a verb doesn’t sound much stranger…
