The contractive possessive apostrophe: Part 2

You’ll be delighted to know that the second part in this series about the contractive possessive apostrophe is even easier than the first one, because (a) it's just a perfectly normal day and most of what you need to know you know already, and (b) because plural possessives are even shorter than regular ones.

To review the previous part quickly: I have postulated that possessive apostrophes are contractive, therefore, do not (or don’t, if you like—it’s shorter) worry about them being different from other apostrophes. They’re not. As well, like simple pronouns such as mine and yours, possessive apostrophes show ownership, or a relationship of possession—of belonging to or with or for (etc.) another thing. Our test case was the idea Kylee had, or the idea by Kylee, or the idea from Kylee that contracted (shrank) to become Kylee’s idea.

In this part, I will debunk completely that the possessive case is more difficult when plurals are involved. How can they be more difficult when we have to write less?

Keep the owners in one piece

The first thing, as before, is to see who or what owns the thing. Is it the idea of Kylee? Is it the speech by the Premier? Is it the pool for the kiddies? Is it the pyjamas on the cats? (I did promise you some cats!) Now, keep the owners in one piece. Don't break up the Premier, or Kylee, or the cats—and certainly, don't break up the kiddies. That would be very dreadful, poor little things.

Let’s run through the singular case quickly and see how it compares to the plural.

1. If a cat (singular) is in pyjamas, then

2. the pyjamas are that cat’s;

3. as such, we can write, “the cat’s pyjamas”.

Nothing new there. Clearly, if only one cat owns pyjamas (and for the sake laundry alone, let us hope it is only one), the “ ’s ” will stand in for the ownership, for the missing preposition “of”—that is, the pyjamas of the cat—as before.

Chuck away the "s"

If we decide to add some cats, however (as many as we like, and all for the bargain price of one s), we can then have:

1. Five cats (plural) in pyjamas, and

2. the pyjamas are those cats’;

3. so that we can write, “the cats’ pyjamas”.

As you can see, we have kept the entire noun, all the owners of the pyjamas, that is, the “cats”, together and this word has become possessive. We signal this by adding only the apostrophe after the noun. Like I said, we write less: We write cats’.

If you (as I hope) follow me at this early point, you can stop reading now. Laughs follow with extra clarity, but it’s up to you.

It seems that happily (or haply, as I think more probable), all of our accumulated laziness over time about writing the letter “s” too much in these cases has evolved into the convention of dropping the s that belongs to the possessive in all cases where a word already ends in s.

But the possessive was only comprised of an apostrophe and an s! Are we really this lazy?!?

Yes!

It is still correct to write the cats’s pyjamas (if there are five cats, as before—only let us hope at least one of them can do laundry, because I’m not doing it), but it’s lovely that we don’t need to, because, apart from saving us ink and muscular energy, it is so hideous to sibilance our way through a sentence as though we are animated snakes (see Lego Ninjago on Netflix for a particularly good/aggravating example of animated snake sibilance).

As mentioned, this even more truncated form applies to all words that already end in s, including singular nouns that end in s, such as pyjamas, so that the legs of the pyjamas could become the pyjamas’ legs (except that we usually just say “pajama legs”, but that’s another story about the plural emerging due to the bifurcation of a single piece of clothing).

To clarify by example:

• the kiddies' pool (pool for the kiddies)

• a gallimimus’ egg (an egg laid by a gallimimus)

• the measles’ side effects (the side effects caused by the measles)

• the news’ timing (the timing of the news).

As to whether one would actually write these things (or not), I hope you will read the final instalment of Kylee’s idea in Part 3 of The Contractive Possessive Apostrophe, in which I’ll explicate some issues of style that particularly apply to the use of possessives in formal or academic writing, and a few idiomatic cases (like the pyjamas) that can't be avoided in the dynamics of language morphology because (a) people are lazy and grammar helps them be lazy, and (b) words convey more than their literal meanings because they operate in a context).

I leave you with this prompt for plural possessives: keep the owners in one piece, and use only an apostrophe after any owners that end in s.

Have a beautiful (and, hopefully, a perfectly normal) day.