Which is correct :
Regis’ show sucks.
OR
Regis’s show sucks.
?
All through school, I was taught that the former sentence was correct, but Strunk & White’s Elements of Style claims the latter choice is the right one. (On page 1 even. Apparently it’s a pretty common mistake.)
So who’s right?
Regis’ show sucketh.
I would always go for the latter choice (Regis’s) on the basis that “Regis’ show sucks” clearly means “the show belonging to many people called Regi sucks”. I would also say, “RE-jis-uz” rather than “RE-jis”.
The “Regis’” usage seems to be pretty well-established though. St Thomas’s Hospital in London has massive lettering on the outside saying “St Thomas’ Hospital”. I walk past it every day and it really pisses me off. I have never met anybody who called it “St TOM-ass Hospital” nor have I met anybody who can explain how you get “TOM-ass-uz” from “Thomas’”. The usual justification, that it “looks funny” to write “s’s” doesn’t wash. After all, we don’t throw other grammatical rules out because the results “look funny”.
Sorry, should have put some spaces in there: some of my apostrophes got swallowed up by by quotation marks.
My Webster’s Standard American Style Manual says
One of their examples of the note is “for convenience’ sake.”
Although I suppose there are certain special cases (like ENugent’s manual note on ‘convenience’), the indication I’ve got (from an English doctoral candidate, who, although he wouldn’t object, would find it odd that I’m saying have got in this sentence) is that the ‘s’ should always be pronounced, even if it’s not always written.
This is because the apostrophe signifies something removed : in the case of the possessives, it’s the letter ‘e’. Formerly (most, I think) possessives were formed by adding ‘es’ to words (cf. German genetive masc. and neut., which decline similarly). The use of the apostrophe to represent the ‘s’ as well is what gives us St. Thomas’ yielding “Saint Thomases” when spoken.
panama jack
Either.
In standard American English, you use an apostrophe without an s when making a possessive of a plural noun ending in s. With a singular noun ending in s, you use an apostrophe AND an s.
(E.g.:"I finally managed to struggle out from under the ***succubus's*** suffocating weight."
“I was determined never again to succumb to the ***voices’*** hypnotic power.”)
According to this rule, this would make your second example correct.
HOWEVER, it wouldn’t be English if there weren’t exceptions and, in this case, contentions. Some authorities allow the following exceptions:
–an apostrophe alone when forming the possessive of a proper noun ending in s (this would render your first example correct according to those authorities)
–an apostrophe alone when an added swould make three s sounds in a row.
(E.g. The ***princess’*** world came crashing down around her ears: there would be no surgery.)
Other authorities—chiefly British, IIRC–allow the exception only in the case of proper nouns of antiquity.
(E.g. She awakened screaming, ***Jesus’*** terrible leer etched forever upon her memory.)
This always seemed a bit arbitrary to me, but it makes a certain kind of sense in a culture so horribly afraid of defacing the icons of its forefathers.
I don’t have any of my style books with me to cite specific sources, but I have researched this a bit in my previous job as a copy proofreader, and remember discovering several contradictory citations. I finally developed a style manual for our own to refer to in these cases for consistency’s sake. We went with the exceptions for proper nouns and the third s sound in a row, my rule of thumb being: write the s if you would speak it when saying the word. YMMV.
All my older brothers and sisters were taught the same thing that you were. I went through the same school system (in New York State) a few years later, and learned the rule of Strunk & White. Apparently, they changed the rules of English grammar in the few years between.
The FAQs at alt.usage.english are in agreement with
lissener’s post.
I always teach my English students that a singular noun gets the 's even if it already ends in an s. The books say so as well.