Interesting. I wonder if this depends on what edition of the Stylebook you have. I got my information from Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, in which he says:
My university library has the 1996 edition of the AP Stylebook. On my next visit, i’ll have a look and see if Garner has misread the information.
Are you sure he’s not only referring to proper nouns ending in “s”? I’ve been using the AP stylebook since 1995, and there hasn’t been any change in rules that I am aware of.
Colophon – You might be surprised that the Chicago Manual of Style also recommends that usage.
To clarify (or further confuse):
AP dictates a simple apostrophe after singular proper nouns ending in “s.”
Jones’ car
Chicago Style recommends an apostrophe-s after the same.
Jones’s car
Chicago Style makes exception to certain names, like Jesus and Moses
Jesus’ disciples
AP & Chicago agree on appearance’ sake, conscience’ sake, and the such. (Actually, I think most stylebooks have this as an exception to normal apostrophe rules.)
AP has the weird rule about too-many-esses in a row:
Waitress’s cart but Waitress’ seat
Chicago does not:
Waitress’s cart and Waitress’s seat.
except that Chicago drops the “s” in goodness’ sake for euphony.
I think I got that right. Everything clearer? 
Not as far as i can tell. As i suggested, though, i’m not discounting the possibility that he misinterpreted the AP Stylebook’s rules. Although, given Garner’s general excellence and meticulousness, i would be surprised if this were the case.
In keeping with the southern pronunciation discussion, my grandmother (born and raised in Louisiana) always pronounced “Woolworth’s” as “Woolsworth”. I had always thought this was just because she was as dumb as a bag of hammers, but then I saw O Brother Where Art Thou, and the Mississippi sales clerk therein also pronounced it “Woolsworth”. I’m guessing this is a regional mispronunciation thing.
Never understood what is so UNclear about NUclear. Nobody goes around saying “unkyular” do they? The pronunciations of the two words aren’t that different - the “clear” in “nuclear” is something more of a dipthong - so why the confusion with one and not the other?
Huh? I’d have thought it is perfectly fucking clear that this is total bollocks. Which word do you use more often, “clear” or “muscular”?
It’s not hard. “Let’s clear this room out. Then we’ll have a new clear space to use.” Wow - new… clear… nuclear… I said it right, mom!
I’m still boggling over that “appearance’ sake” thing. I’m fairly certain that one hasn’t crossed the Atlantic yet.
From The Times style guide:
I must say, though, that I find the rule of not adding an “s” where the final “s” is silent to be a little odd - I mean, surely the fact that it is silent means you should add a voiced “s”, otherwise you mentally pronounce Delors’ as “Duh-lohr” rather than “Duh-lohr’s”.
People?
It is its if it’s its. Example: The local boy scout troop cancelled its weekly den meeting because a known sex offender had moved in next door. You n’it w’it.
Ok, British people, you say Aluminium because it is spelled that way. What about battery (Batt-REE), military, cemetary, etc. It isn’t spelled that way so you can’t use that excuse. I myself say Batt-REE because I learned it from my dad. He grew up in Indiana. His dad doesn’t say it. We had some british influence about 200 years ago, but I can’t find anything more recent.
Strangely, this accent is perceived as lazy or stupid, but “quaint”. :rolleyes:
Bad argument. Both pop and soda are suitable substitutes of each other. Like sofa and couch or car and automobile. Calling soda pop is not mispronouncing soda…such as saying “sado” is mispronouncing soda. It is calling soda by another acceptable name. The “people” who say “aks” are not trying to pronounce the word “inquire” and due to a severely skewered dialect it sounds like “aks”. So we get enough people to start saying sado and it becomes dialect excusable pronunciation and not mispronunciation? Wherterver!
—sorry for being a post hog—
…is NOT perceived…
carry on
I don’t think they’re as similar as you say although I, personally, have no problem pronouncing it correctly. My original statement was taken from W. Saffire’s analysis, who is pretty knowledgeable about word origins and pronunciations.
Back to the OP, is it more common to make the “aks” mistake in the past tense than in the present tense? Seems to me you hear it more ask “akst”, for “asked” than as “aks” for “ask”. I could be wrong about this, but just wondering if anyone else has that impression. As noted earlier, I don’t think “ask” is an unusual English sound combination and have trouble understanding that it doesn’t “roll off the tongue easily”, however “asked” is a bit more difficult to say.
“Ax” is present tense. “Axt” is past tense. I have never heard someone use “ax” for “ask”, but then say it properly in past tense.
“Lemme ax you a question…”
“I axt her why…”
Maybe my mangled sentence structure obscured what I intended to say. I was actually asking (axing?) if the mistake is more common in the past tense than in the present tense:
“I **akst ** him yesterday, but I’ll **ask ** him again tomorrow”.
“Asked” is actually a awkward to pronounce.
Like I was saying before, I have never heard someone do this. People who say “ax” use it equally across tenses in my experience.
But I agree that “asked” is harder to pronounce than “ask”.
Upon reflection, I tend to pronounce “asked” as something closer to “assed”, with an extremely muted ‘K’ sound inserted. A crisp ‘K’ followed immediately by an equally crisp ‘T’ (which is how ‘-ed’ is pronounced in this case) lend themselves to being seperate syallables, turning “asked” into a three-syllable word. I, like most people, do not care to have this happen in everyday speech, thus: I assed him a question.
As far as the whole “aks” thing goes, it mildly irks me as well, but I ignore it (just as I imagine most here who dispute this usage do). It’s definitely not the product of an accent, in which specific phonemes are prounouced differently: the British would aah-sk you something; Americans would ask it (with a much shorter ‘A’ sound). Accents do not result in the reversal of the order of phoneme pronunciation, merely the alteration of individual pronunciations. It’s closer to being a dialect, since one could argue that a seperate word entirely is being substituted for a specific word in the “standard” language. Though I have my doubts about what particular dialect “aks” would fall into, I can accept the plausibility of this argument, which is why I do not challenge the issue directly (well, that and the fact that I don’t make it a point to go around challenging others’ grammar).
Really, I think the reason it bugs me in the first place is that “ax”, or “axe” if you prefer, is a perfectly valid English word that refers to a chopping tool. Normally, if a word’s origin is based in a dialect, it will either be unique to that dialect (in other words, they made it up), or else linked to a word in a language other than the one of which the dialect is a subsect. Please note that I do not have a cite for this; it is nothing more than my understanding of the subject (and thus the basis of my opinion) and should only be regarded as such. It’s the same reason that the use of “ideal” to mean “idea” bothers me, while “idear” does not. One is a mispronunciation, the other is just using the wrong damn word. I should also note that if such a usage is caused by an accent, such as southerners saying “heel” instead of “hill”, it doesn’t bother me at all. The intended word is clearly conveyed by context, and I consider this to be at worst a simple mispronunciation.
Damn, that’s a pretty complex rationalization for why stuff bugs me, isn’t it? I guess my subconscious has a lot of spare time on its hands to think about this crap.
I don’t know which Britons you’ve been listening to, but none that I know of says “Batt-REE”. It’s “BAT-uh-ree” in standard English, with the accent on the first syllable and three pronounced syllables. Isn’t that the normal American pronunciation too?
Military and cemetery (with an “e”, not an “a”) I’ll give you - we Brits say “MILL-it-(uh)ree” and “SEM-uht-(uh)ree”, both with the accent on the first syllable and the -uh- syllable more or less swallowed, depending on the speaker - some people say “MILL-it-ree”, others “MILL-it-uh-ree”. However, unless we’ve been watching too many movies, we don’t stress the third syllable in the American way, which to my ears sounds like “mill-i-TERR-ee”.
Quibbling about pronunciation could go on all day though, and I suspect it will.
Colophon,
Granted, you are in Hampshire, you hear it every day. However, I have heard some brits drop the “uh” in battery, and in artery, elementary, etc. The emphasis tends to be on the REE sound. The first time I said Batt-REE around my girlfriend’s dad (He’s from Leeds, but a long time ago), he asked where I got the Brighton accent. So I don’t know. It is an amusement for the other kids in medical school, as they ask me to say ar-TREE instead of artery. I don’t say pul-moh-n-uhry instead of pul-muh-nary, so I don’t have an accent on everything. I can’t unlearn it, but I can pronounce battery and artery normal. I never say lottery with odd emphasis, probably because I never heard it pronounced that way. Maybe I’m just odd (likely).
I also say deh-po instead of DEE-po for depot. Who knows.
Agreed. There’s so many real things to focus on in regard to the president that criticizing him for speaking in a particular regional dialect is not only stupid, it makes the left look like a bunch of idiots who parrot what their fourth grade teacher told them.