This story appeared in The New York Times on August 10, 2024
With Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz running on the same ticket, grammar geeks are in overdrive.
By Remy Tumin
Aug. 10, 2024
When Vice President Kamala Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, she put to rest weeks of speculation over the future of the Democratic ticket. But the battle over apostrophes was just getting started.
Where were voters (and journalists) supposed to place the possessive squiggle?
It all felt a bit, as some social media users described, like apostrophe hell: Would it be Ms. Harris’s and Mr. Walz’s or Ms. Harris’ and Mr. Walz’s? The Harrises and the Walzes? The Harrises’ family home and the Walzes’ family dog? It was enough to see double, made worse by the fact that stylebooks, large news organizations and grammar geeks were all split or contradicted one another.
“Anyone who tells you there are universal rules to how to add an apostrophe ending in S is either wrong or lying,” Jeffrey Barg, a grammar columnist, said. “You can’t be wrong as long as you’re consistent.”
The Associated Press Stylebook, widely considered to be the gold standard among news organizations, is clear on its rule for the possessive of singular proper names ending in S — only an apostrophe is needed (Harris’), though there are always exceptions. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal all do the opposite, opting for ’s to mark a singular possessive and a simple apostrophe for plural possessive (Harrises’ and Walzes’).
Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in America, splits the difference: For names ending in an S or Z sound, you can add ’s or just an apostrophe, though the dictionary says ’s is the more common choice.
“People want to know what the rules are because they want to do this correctly,” said Mr. Barg, who was raised on The A.P. Stylebook. But at the same time, “you can’t impose language from the top down — it’s a bottom-up thing,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a learning experience for us as a country.”
According to Merriam-Webster, the apostrophe first appeared in the early 16th century and was originally used to indicate that something had been taken out of a word. Couple the evolution of the punctuation mark with the difficulty of the English language, which draws deeply from German and French, and problems are bound to arise. The core of the stumble falls when we go to write something that does not match how we talk.
“This is the kind of thing you get when have three languages in a trench coat,” said Nicole Holliday, an acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
People can easily pronounce the plural or possessive of Harris or Walz, both of which contain epenthetic schwas, Ms. Holliday said. When a word ends in an S or Z sound, we insert a schwa — the “uh”-like sound that can be represented by any vowel in the English alphabet — to break up a block of consonants.
Put two epenthetic schwas on a ticket and the so-called apostrophe hell breaks loose. She surmised that the online debate might be fueled by Democrats wanting to one-up each other in their grammar geekdom.
JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is in the same grammar situation with the possessive of his name, “but because we spell it with an E, nobody thinks that’s weird,” she said.
Ms. Holliday had historically used The A.P. style in her research of Ms. Harris’s linguistic choices. But she is starting to come around to using ’s on all presidential and vice-presidential candidates — Harris’s, Walz’s, Trump’s, Vance’s.
“I love an elegant solution,” she said.
Ellen Jovin, the author of “Rebel With a Clause,” said that A.P. style “causes strain on the system,” in part because in a way it splits the ticket — it’s Harris’ but Walz’s. “That’s going to freak people out,” she said.
“I feel it’s one of the more emotional hot-button grammar issues out there,” she continued. “English speakers often don’t like to see S’s jammed up against each other, which I don’t really relate to.”
But at the end of the day, withholding an extra S after Harris “just doesn’t fit what people say,” she said.
Bob McCalden, who leads the Apostrophe Protection Society in the United Kingdom, agreed.
“The challenge I would put to anyone that said, no, the possessive of Harris is just with an apostrophe, is how do you say that?” he said. By using only an apostrophe and not including an extra S, the name doesn’t flow properly, he said.
The questions of apostrophe placement regarding Harris and Walz are far from the most debated use of the punctuation mark, Mr. McCalden said. (That would be using orange’s instead of oranges.) But the discourse comes at a pivotal time for apostrophes: Thursday, Aug. 15, is International Apostrophe Day.