[Hawkeye Pierce]I want an harmonica![/Hawkeye Pierce]
Good point! One way of avoiding the issue completely is to transform the noun into an adjective. I do this all the time in my editing work.
Thanks. I’d been reading about them and wondered how the name was commonly pronounced.
I take it you didn’t bother reading the entire quote let alone read the cite.
So what else is new? :rolleyes:
This is also where we get the slang verb “bumble”, as in a bumbling fool or bumbling idiot. If you bumble something up, you are failing in the manner of Mr. Bumble.
Correct. Brooks in this context is NOT a plural noun; it’s a word that ends in s. Therefore, it’s Mr. Brooks’s car. Just like it’s Mr. Ross’s car. If the car belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Brooks, it’s the Brookses’ car.
I do use Jesus’s as well, but I know that Jesus’ and Moses’ are accepted as exceptions.
Is that because they’re affecting a French accent, or is it really English Received Pronunciation? 
I read it all. There’s an unnecessary weasel at the end.
This will vary by style manual. Most of the modern guides I’m familiar with do what you say: add apostrophe-s to singular names ending in s. One notable exception, though, is Associated Press style, which calls for the bare apostrophe in singular names ending in ‘s.’
So, there’s no one “correct” answer here. It depends on the style guide you are following. Though I was taught AP style due to my background in journalism, I prefer the Chicago Manual of Style as a general style manual, so I use apostrophe-s myself.
There was a spot on the BBC about this a few years back. The example used by the grammarian they interviewed was The Diary of Samuel Pepys. His verdict: Both variants are prefectly acceptable, though convention in recent times has shifted to the simpler, more economical spelling.
Strictly speaking, “brooks” is indeed a plural noun, or at least it can be treated as one even when it’s a person’s name.
Londoners drop aitches. It certainly isn’t pretentious to say “an 'istoric”. Even Dick Van Dyke knew that.
That’s interesting. I would have guessed the convention went the other way. I remember learning the bare apostrophe when I was in grammar and high school, and more recently it seems to me that the apostrophe-s has become favored.
I’m 99.999% sure that’s what he said, as it confirmed what I already thought. The possessive “-'s” comes from dropping the “e” in the old English genitive ending “-es,” hence the apostrophe. The ending was the same in both the singular and the plural; in the latter case, the entire ending was dropped, rather than just the “e.” So you would end up with, e.g., “the girl’s books” (one girl) and “the girls’ books” (more than one girl). With irregular nouns, you now tack the “-'s” on to the end of the plural: “The children’s hour,” “the men’s room.” Easier to pronounce that way.
Oh, then maybe I’m misunderstanding. I’m talking about in cases of proper singular nouns ending in “s.”
Actually, there’s an interesting graph someone came up with here regarding the apostrophe and apostrophe-s forms in American English for singular possessives for 14 names from 1810 onward. Looks like the peak popularity for bare apostrophe forms was about 1935-1955.
But it’s irrelevant when deciding how to punctuate its possessive, and in fact would potentially lead to a mistake, since the possessive of many brooks is always brooks’.