Dartblog

“If Bill wants to put an adjective in front of ‘capitalism,’ then perhaps he should consider ‘universal’.”

UPDATE: Via e-mail, George Potts inserts himself thus:

O tempores, O mores.

Your latest blog title “Bill Gates’s etc.” brings to mind how things must continually change, no matter how puny. When I was a lad, possessive constructions for words ending in “s” were made with just an apostrophe such as “the Potts’ abode.” But the NY Times has stuck its nabobian nose into things again and now decrees in its “Manual of Style and Usage” that such possessives as you used contain an apostrophe and another “s” — to me, redundant (again).

Like most of us hoary-haired ones, I will stay anchored in the past.

My teachers used Mr. Potts’s rule, in fact. But since it seems me to sprout more cases of vagueness than the alternative I have since secondary school opted to use the extra “s,” odd though it may look.

I don’t know Times style on this. I have the AP book on my desk here, and it recommends an additional “s” for singular common nouns (unless the next word itself begins with the letter “s,” but that is silly aesthetics) but no additional “s” for singular proper nouns. Hence I am wrong in AP’s book. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, I note, is on my side.

UPDATE: Reader Scott Meacham writes:

The example of “the Potts’ abode” confuses matters by attempting to use the plural form of Potts. The plural form of Potts is Pottses, and therefore his example should read “the Pottses’ abode.” A phrase demonstrating his rule in the singular is “Mr. Potts’ abode.” You (and the English, who also follow your superior rule, I believe) would write “the Pottses’ abode” and “Mr. Potts’s abode,” respectively.

Meanwhile, Tim Dreisbach writes:

I see you also fall in with the old rule of putting punctuation such as commas and periods within the quotation marks.

That rule of style is, I believe, a remnant of the limitations of physical typesetting. It seems much better to keep the quotations and the punctuation separate. Is there any logical reason beyond historic precedent to do “otherwise”?

I am not certain on the point. I do know that placing the comma inside the ending quotation mark looks, on the page, very much better than placing the comma outside.