One of the great questions of American life comes up whenever we have a day in celebration of mothers, fathers, presidents, or veterans: Where do you stick the apostrophe? Should there even be an ...

Apostrophes are used for genitive (or possessive) cases. They are sometimes used as punctuation marks to shorten a sentence. The basis from which we arrive at vagaries of the genitive (or possessive) ...

Oh, dear. It had to happen sooner or later: a direct clash with Chronicle editorial authority over a point of 19th-century prescriptive grammar. My Our esteemed editor, Heidi Landecker, who has saved ...

“I don’t stay up nights worrying,” said John Lennon in 1965. “Summers I used to cover Missouri,” wrote Thornton Wilder in 1934. “I went over there afternoons,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1929. Why do ...

Last year, grammatical tragedy struck in the heart of England when Birmingham City Council decreed that apostrophes were to be forever banished from public addresses. To the horror of purists and ...

We can demonstrate the link between two nouns either by using possessive forms (the US bank's finance division / the finance division of the US bank) or compound nouns (the US bank finance division).

In two weeks’ time, Brent’s and Roy’s wives will test the limits of Brent and Roy’s friendship. No, that’s not my pitch for the world’s lamest movie of the week. It’s a sentence designed to showcase ...