It is standard in some style guides. AP style, for example, says: “SINGULAR PROPER NAMES ENDING IN S: Use only an apostrophe.” (This is from the1987 edition of the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual)
This is not new usage. This is kind of old-fashioned, as I said. The trend is actually going the OTHER way, to using the apostrophe-s. I was taught in grammar school in the 80s to use the bare apostrophe on names ending in “s.” Only in the last ten years have I gotten to using the apostrophe-s version (which is what I prefer.) I am speaking as to USA usage. YMMV in other varieties of English.
I work in publishing too, and I’ve never understood why Jesus should be an exception: you can’t convey the possessive without clearly pronouncing the second s.
In other words, Peter was one of Jesus’s disciples, not one of Jesus disciples (the way it sounds with just the apostrophe).
Nor do I understand why it should be omitted in names like Elias. Again, those are clearly Elias’s books, not Elias books.
In cases like St James’ Park or Mel Brooks’ movies, I can see the logic in dropping the final s, since the meaning is perfectly clear without it, and it would sound awkward trying to pronounce it. But not when the possessive meaning disappears along with the final s.
The original genitive (possessive) ending in English hundreds of years ago was -es, in both the singular and the plural.
So you would have said (and written) the girles books (if there was one girl) and the girlses books (if there was more than one girl).
Over time, the e in the first version was dropped and an apostrophe was used to indicate a letter was missing. In the second case, the entire ending was dropped and replaced with an apostrophe.
Irregular nouns generally retain the -'s ending in the plural: the children’s books, the men’s room.
According to the BBC (there was a program dedicated to this), dropping the final s after a name ending in a sybilant is a fairly recent innovation, and often both versions may still be considered correct: Samuel Pepys’s diary or Samuel Pepys’ diary, take your pick.
[li]He refers to Cronkite passing F-106s in their bunkers in Vietnam.[/li][/QUOTE]
Maybe this is a euphemism to describe what happened when Cronkite ate the canned chili?
I just hate missing the opportunity to say “Joneses’s.”
(I actually once saw a manuscript where it was rendered “the Jone’s,” if you can believe that!)
A First Edition, First State book is when they make a change mid-print run, often due to error. With As I Lay Dying, the first state has the big first letter on a page mis-aligned; with The Sun Also Rises there’s an extra “s” in a word; with A Farewell to Arms, the heroine’s name is misspelled on the inner flap.
I once read this book about two Stanford grads who were going around visiting all of the parks in Major League Baseball. I thought it was a fun read overall. The section on the Montreal Expos was particularly interesting – I think it was the very first time that I had ever come across that Canadian delicacy called poutine. But when it came time to discuss Wrigley Field and the Cubbies, they somehow managed to misspell Harry Caray’s name. Oof!
i see this kind of stuff all the time. the most egregious was a steve earle biography called “hardcore troubadour”. the ones i remember are the band Tesla being ‘Tessler’, apostrophes being quotation marks in various places, and management company Q-Prime being referred to as Q-Prine in every circumstance except one. obviously they ran it through some terrible software but the one instance of Q-Prime being correct makes me wonder. i also really hope Tesla/Tessler was an error due to dictation by someone with an accent.
I have an edition of Lovecraft’s stories by Barnes and Nobles that has a whole bunch of weird typos such as the Yen sign popping up quite often. It got quite a lot of complaints obviously.
Also in S.M. Stirling books, I’ve seen the Japanese sword wakizashi constantly misspelled as wazikashi, and the British insult “berk” misspelled as “burke” throughout.
In other places, “sneak peak” seems to have displaced “sneak peek”. How a mountain can be stealthy I don’t know.
