Irked, are we?
I see what you did there.
left out an article
Cow-irker is a lesser-known variant of the dreaded message board spelling “Cow-orker” variant of Co-worker.
Whenever I see this thread title, I think “The Smith’s theorem” looks like something out of Chaucer (like “The Miller’s Tale”).
Got it.
Or an album from the eighties.
The apostrophe’s in the wrong place for that.
The stupid Flanderses house.
Could it be as simple as the fact that “green” the noun has the same form as “green” the adjective, so the genitive form is used in order to diminish the parsing difficulty that native English speakers might have?
Also, although a recent thread lumped Green in an elite group of mostly self-educated mathematicians, the genitive form is not commonly associated with the theorems or results of other members in that group (Ramanujan, for example), so a simpler explanation for Green’s singular naming scheme is probably at work.
Very true. It’s a simple matter of style.
Not true. Higgs’ and Higgs’s aren’t pronounced the same.
I pronounce them the same. How do you differentiate them?
According to Strunk & White, “Higgs’s” would be more correct, and would be pronounced “Higgses”. However, S&W allow the other usage for (archaic?) exceptions like “For Jesus’ sake”. I didn’t see the logic.
Most newspapers don’t follow S&W, preferring the form that uses less ink, I’d guess.
Higgs and Higgs’ == [hɪgz]
Higgs’s and Higgses and Higgses’ == [hɪgzɪz] or [hɪgzəz]
In any ordinary sentence - "That’s Higgs’ uncle, Ascenray Exapno Higgs - the expected pronunciation would be “That’s hɪgzɪz uncle” not “That’s hɪgz uncle” because the possessive is being emphasized. Even more so for two-syllable words. “That’s Jesus’ foreskin on display”* would be almost impossible without saying Jesuses.
This may be regional or cultural or dialectal, I suppose, but it’s the way I’ve always heard it.
*Actually saw this claimed on a reliquary in Paris.
I hear it the other way fairly routinely in mainstream media, like TV and radio, including NPR. The public TV program Rick Steves’ Europe, for example. And on the few occasions I’ve listened to a preacher, he pronounced Jesus’ without the additional iz.