The department of language study which has to do with spelling and punctuation, capitalization and formatting and myriad other miscellaneous but essential matters of presentation is called mechanics. As the indispensable Garner’s Modern American Usage puts it, the mechanics of language constitute the “devices that lend clarity to writing.” Too often we mistake such niceties as superfluous rules of etiquette, and we slip twice if we forget that being clear and precise is of preeminent importance in writing, and that the point of etiquette, linguistic or otherwise, is to make smooth the path for someone else to understand all that we are saying.
One such mechanical device that is often unsure to writers involves the use of the apostrophe. This mark is most often used to indicate the possessor of something, and its bent shape (‘) can be used to remember that it is pointing to the possessor, whether singular or plural. (The term apostrophe means in Greek to bend or twist or turn away, and so the graphic idea is that the mark is pointing away from what is possessed and toward its possessor.) Thus, to speak of an actor’s costume (where the apostrophe is pointing back to a singular noun) means that one actor possesses one costume, but to speak of the actors’ costumes (where now the apostrophe points to a plural noun) means that there are a number of costumes belonging to a number of actors. And, indeed, if we were referring to one costume shared by many actors who played the same role at different performances, we would say the actors’ costume—one costume belonging to a number of actors. (And this is probably the place to remind ourselves that the apostrophe is never used with pronouns to show possession: its, not it’s. The latter form does exist, of course, but as the contraction for the pronoun and verb it is.)
Now a question commonly arises when the possessor ends with the letter s: should it be the bus’ tire or the bus’s tire? The buses’ tires or the buses’s tires? With mechanical questions like this (grammatical, not automotive), the source to refer to and to keep consistent with is one of the many style guides written by academic and institutional authorities. These will differ in some points according to the kind of writing they are meant to address, and so we are to choose one (or accept as directed the one) to follow—and this is most important—consistently. So, for example, on this question of forming the possessives, The Chicago Manual of Style succinctly defines the governing rule: “The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s, and the possessive of plural nouns (except for a few irregular plurals that do not end in s) by adding an apostrophe only.”
Thus, we should write the bus’s tire and the buses’ tires. But, as the Chicago Manual illustrates, we should also expect to see the unexpected: a bass’s stripes (with the unusual three instances of the same consonant), children’s literature (where the possessor children is a plural noun formed without the s), and Williams’s reputation (where the surname ends with an s before another s is added to indicate its function as the possessor of the reputation). Pages of permutations on this theme (mechanical and syntactical) are covered in the Chicago Manual, and so it is better to know where to turn for an answer when a question arises rather than try to remember every last rule in abstracto. Hence the immense importance of turning to the index of such comprehensive works first.
Amidst such great detail we can risk missing the forest for the trees, but if we remember that the minutiae of any craft well understood serves a higher purpose, we can learn to find the answers we need efficiently and unpedantically. The caution we should observe, however, is making things up as we go along. Over one hundred years ago, the American literary critic Irving Babbitt, in his Democracy and Leadership, was concerned about the unfettered development of what has come to be called the “creative imagination.” His conservative (or probably better called now traditional) preoccupations worried over the social effect the absence of reasoned common standards might have. At the heart of his political worries over what an “anything goes” attitude might produce was his contention that we cannot justifiably introduce a new way of doing things without first knowing what we are departing from. Says Babbitt: “it is impossible, let me repeat, to achieve standards, at least along critical lines, unless one can discover in life somewhere an abiding unity with which to measure its mere variety and change.”
Babbitt’s cultural observation (in that work and also in his Literature and the American College) is relevant to our topic of linguistic mechanics here. Change is inevitable—changes in punctuation, capitalization, and all the rest of the details that make for clarity—but what changes we make must be apprised in light of the reasons we have been doing things as we have. If we can’t find a reason, or if we have no good reason for changing a long-standing custom, then it might just be better—in the preeminent interests of precision and courtesy—to leave miscellaneous matters as they stand and follow the rules. There are opportunities enough elsewhere to be iconoclastic.
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