So many “s’s”

I know I play it a little fast a loose with grammar here on the blog. I make up words on occasion; I use too many ellipses…

The truth is, I love correct grammar, punctuation and spelling. I read Grammar Girl for fun. I peruse the “AP Style Book” and the “Chicago Manuel of Style.” That’s not to say you won’t find lots of mistakes in this forum, but I try.

When I was a senior in high school I once got a paper back from my high school English teacher with one comment: “nice use of a semicolon.” I couldn’t have been prouder. And I still remember that so many years later, bit don’t remember any other teachers’ comments. I recently read an article in which a college English professor wrote that he always checks for plagiarism when a student uses a semicolon correctly. Really? That’s the clue that someone else wrote the paper? I would have had all my work inspected–I LOVE semicolons. Yeah, I’m a nerd.

So, you can imagine my distress when I realized that I have been making Anders’s name possessive incorrectly for almost 4.5 years. Personally, I prefer “Anders'” to “Anders’s”. It’s less clunky and easier to pronounce.

From now on you’ll see Anders’s name like that–not like this: Anders’. I’m not happy about it, but that’s what we get for choosing a name that ends in “s.”

I don’t even want to get into the correct Swedish pronunciation of his name. Suffice to say, it’s nothing close to the way we say it.