Possessed

(bright music)

Hi, I'm Mary Norris.

A copy editor at The New Yorker.

And today we're going to deal not with commas

but with apostrophes.

In particular,

the formation of the possessive.

There's a very simple rule.

You form the possessive of a singular noun

by adding an apostrophe S.

I've been seeing something that looks like a mistake to me.

A name ending in S

with only the apostrophe

and not the extra S,

as if there were something hideous to the ear and the eye

about an extra S.

From the magazine,

we have the name Dickens

as in Charles Dickens.

Dickens's commas.

We have spelled it with an apostrophe S.

Another thing is the possessive of a plural noun.

If we are talking about the children of Charles Dickens,

he had a lot of children,

we would talk about the Dickenses'

apostrophe house, say.

When a word already ends in an S

and it is the plural,

then it's okay to just add an apostrophe

to form the possessive.

There are a few exceptions to this rule.

The classical Greek names like

Aristophanes, Euripides, Demosthenes

those names already have lots of Ss in them,

and the final S has the Z sound,

the voiced S.

So form the possessive with only an apostrophe

following the final S in the name.

Another exception is the name Jesus.

We just use an apostrophe after the second S.

So when you're forming the possessive of a singular noun,

even if it ends in S,

use an apostrophe S.

Okay?

I would appreciate it.

And next time,

we can talk about something else.