Whatever motivated Vice President Kamala Harris to pick out Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, it probably wasn't a desire to fire up debates about apostrophes. But it doesn't take much to get grammar nerds riled up.
“The lower the stakes, the bigger the fight,” said Ron Woloshun, a creative director and digital marketer in California who jumped into the fray on social media lower than an hour after Harris selected Walz last week to present his views on possessive pronouns.
The Associated Press style book says, “Use only one apostrophe” for singular proper nouns that end in S: Dickens' novels, the labors of Hercules, the lifetime of Jesus. But not everyone agrees.
The debate over possessive pronouns ending in “S” began shortly after President Joe Biden cleared the best way for Harris' candidacy last month. Is it Harris' or Harris's? But the selection of Walz, together with his last name that feels like an “S,” has really fueled the talk, says Benjamin Dreyer, retired editor in chief at Random House and writer of “Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.”
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Within minutes of the announcement, which got here during a visit to the dentist, Dreyer was inundated with questions.
“I thought, 'Okay, everyone just needs to relax. I'll be home soon and I can sit down at my desk,'” he said.
While there’s widespread agreement that Walz's ruling is correct, confusion stays over Harris' ruling vs. Harris' ruling. Dreyer's ruling? Add the 's.
“Setting 's is just easier, and then you can use your precious brain cells for more important things,” he said.
Woloshun expressed an analogous opinion on the social platform X, where apostrophes are thrown around like hand grenades. “The rule is simple: when you say the S, spell the S,” he argued.
This puts them on the identical side because the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal – and in contradiction with AP.
Although AP's style has evolved on many fronts over time, there are not any immediate plans to vary its policies on possessive pronouns, says Amanda Barrett, AP's vice chairman for news standards and inclusion.
“This is a long-standing strategy of the AP. It has served us well and we see no real need to change it,” she said. “We know there is a debate and that people make different choices when it comes to grammar, and that's all fine. Everyone makes the decision that works best for them.”
Timothy Pulju, a lecturer in linguistics at Dartmouth College, said that until the seventeenth or 18th century, the possessive type of proper names ending in S – similar to Jesus or Moses – was often simply the name itself, without an apostrophe or additional S. Eventually, the apostrophe was added (Jesus' or Moses') to point possession, although the pronunciation remained the identical.
“That kind of became the standard that I was taught and that I hold myself to, even though in retrospect I don't think it's a great standard,” he said.
That's because linguists consider writing to be a representation of speech, and language has modified since then. Pulju said he expects the 's form to eventually prevail. But for now, he – together with the Merriam-Webster dictionary – says each forms are acceptable.
“As long as people are communicating successfully, we say the language is doing what it's supposed to do,” he said. “If you can read it, no matter how it's written, it seems to work for people. They're not confused about whose running mate Tim Walz is.”
If she wins in November, Harris could be the third U.S. president with a final name ending in “S,” and the primary since Rutherford B. Hayes, who was elected in 1876 – 130 years before the creation of Twitter – and was spared the social media furore over apostrophes. Harris is the primary candidate with such a sensitive last name since 1984, when Democrat Michael Dukakis lost to George HW Bush.
Dukakis, now 90, said in a telephone interview Monday that he couldn’t recall an analogous discussion when he was a candidate, but he agrees with the AP.
“To me it sounds like it's an S, an apostrophe, and that's it,” he said.
The Harris campaign, meanwhile, has not yet taken a transparent position. In a press release issued by her New Hampshire team on Monday, she praised “Harris' positive vision,” a day after her national press office wrote of “Harris' seventh trip to Nevada.”
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