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.
Somewhere in the great beyond, William Strunk Jr. is smiling.