I never would have even realize this was a problem, until I recently came across an example of it as I wrote something. How do use the possessive apostrophe-S when something is already in quote marks? For example, you could have:
The King**'s** crown.
For when you want to show the king is in possession of the crown. But what if you are not sure he is the rightful king? Then you might put his name in quotation marks:
The “King”.
Now, how do you put the two above things together. I.e., how do you show the possessive 's and the quotation marks for the same word? The only thing I can come up with so far is:
The "King"s crown.
Which doesn’t look right at all. None of my dictionaries seem to cover this point either. Does anyone know how you resolve this issue? If you find your answer online, please feel free to provide a link.
I’ve always wondered that. In essays I usually try to avoid those situations, but I think for your example, if I had to choose, I’d write it as “King’s”
I am a professional. Here’s what you do: Put the whole thing in quotation marks, if you must use quotation marks, i.e., "the “king’s” crown. Or if you’re writing to Dear Abby and you’ve used a fake name for your sister-in-law: “Jane’s” dog. But usually in this kind of situation you can avoid the quote marks after the first reference.
When in doubt, and if it’s for something that really matters (a letter about a pending job, or this message board, f’rinstance) recast the sentence so you don’t have this problem.
… which is probably the best way around it. Like Cicada, I work in that line, and I’d just avoid the “king’s” crown as untidy. In the larger context of a piece of writing, most likely the precise nature of the King would have been dealt with earlier - “Fred, the alleged King” (or “self-proclaimed King”, “disputed King”, or whatever). So by the time it came to discussing the crown, “his crown” or “Fred’s crown” could be used.
Quotation marks are used in more than one way: to mark a quotation, and to signal that a word or phrase is dubious or questionable in some way (as with a pseudonym or buzz-word). In the former case, you shouldn’t change what is quoted at all, because there is the chance of misrepresentation. In the latter case, changing what is in the quotation marks is not misrepresenting anything at all, and is IMHO fine.
