There’s something I keep reading over and over again which my sense of usage just bristles at: ‘the Hofstadter’s conjecture’, ‘the Frankenstein’s conflation’, or, most recently, ‘the Bell’s theorem’. Is there any sense in which this is correct? To me, it would always have to be either ‘Bell’s theorem’ or ‘the Bell theorem’, but this is getting so frequent (in physics papers) that I’ve been starting to wonder… Am I justly irked, or should I retake my English grammar lessons?
I’d vote for “justly irked”.
+1
I haven’t noticed the trend myself. Any examples? I agree it’s irky usage.
I’ve never noticed this and I would have noticed because irked is the mildest possible word for my condition after seeing such a solecism.
But The Two Cultures and all that. 
Another vote for “justly irked.” I haven’t read many physics papers, but in the contexts I am familiar with (i.e. mathematics), you’d say “Goldbach’s conjecture” or (less often) “the Goldbach conjecture” but never “the Goldbach’s conjecture”—that just makes it sound like it was conjectured by someone named “the Goldbach.”
It irritates me just about as much as ATM machines and PIN numbers.
But, of course, Peter Higgs really has a final S to his name. So it’s all right to talk about “the Higgs boson”, which of course sounds exactly like “the Higg’s boson”.
If he truly were possessive about (heh) the boson, it would be Higgs’ boson, not Higgs’s boson, which is how it often is written with possessives regardless of their final sound.
I am struck with irkness when I see that.
Add me to “irked”. But the one I am uncertain about is “The theorem of Bell’s”. Some style book I looked at called it a double genitive and called it acceptable. Certainly, “The theorem of Bell” sounds wrong, although “Bell’s theorem” sounds best. (I don’t much care for “The Bell theorem”, but it does not rise to the level of irkworthiness.)
At least you all are irking yourselves and giving those poor cows a rest for once.
Is this perhaps a case of hypercorrection by authors whose first language does not use articles?
Could this be the result of non-native-speakers of English imposing some sort of grammatical structure from their own language upon their “scientific” English? (I suppose it might be the actual authors, or someone who is doing translating and/or editing for them.)
I’m sorry. because it sounds like good wit over my head, a not unusual case…
A pertinent case is the name of the book chain Barnes and Noble. I have heard the name only as, for example, “you can find it at Barnes and Noble’s.”
I was surprised when I learned that that was a possessive without a possessed, and not the simple name/noun ending in “s.”
The example that sparked this thread was from a co-author, and didn’t make it to the final version… I’ll try and remember to post the next example I come across.
I believe this is the reason behind some of the examples. But I think it’s spread: German, for instance, does not have such a construction (it’s ‘das Bell-Theorem’ or ‘Bells Theorem’…Hmm, though come to think of it, there’s also ‘das Bellsche Theorem’).
Wouldn’t it be, in general, non-scientific usage, das Bell Theorems (genitive)?
I know people complain about this all the time and I’ve never understood it. That’s proper usage. When the acronym loses the familiar meaning of its words you treat it like a word to itself. The only way to do it wrong, if you want to be pedantic, is not to repeat the word. OPEC country is correct; OPEC nation is not.
Either is correct and is preferred by different style guides.
Unless you’re writing to a particular style guide there should never be a reason to care whether the 's is added. And they are pronounced identically.
Really, both comments are about styles. And styles can never be “correct” - just correct within a context.
Tue genitive would be ‘des Bell-Theorems’, as in ‘der Beweis des Bell-Theorems ist einfach’ (‘the proof of Bell’s theorem is simple’), but I’m asking about the nominative: ‘Bell’s theorem is fundamentaL’ or ‘the Bell theorem is fundamental’ as opposed to ‘the Bell’s theorem is fundamental’.
While we’re at it: Green’s function, or Green function? Most functions or other mathematical objects named after someone seem to take the nominative form (Dirlichet function, Poynting vector, Schwarzschild radius), but in the case of Green, for some reason the genitive seems more common.
“Irky”?
twitch