There’s an apostrophe battle brewing among grammar nerds. Is it Harris’ or Harris’s?

No matter possessed Vice President Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her operating mate, it in all probability wasn’t a want to inflame arguments about apostrophes. However it doesn’t take a lot to get grammar nerds fired up.

“The decrease the stakes, the larger the combat,” stated Ron Woloshun, a inventive director and digital marketer in California who jumped into the fray on social media lower than an hour after Harris chosen Walz final week to supply his tackle possessive correct nouns.

The Related Press Stylebook says “use solely an apostrophe” for singular correct names ending in S: Dickens’ novels, Hercules’ labors, Jesus’ life. However not everybody agrees.

Debate about possessive correct names ending in S began quickly after President Joe Biden cleared the way in which for Harris to run final month. Is it Harris’ or Harris’s? However the choice of Walz together with his sounds-like-an-s surname actually ramped it up, stated Benjamin Dreyer, the retired copy chief at Random Home and writer of “Dreyer’s English: An Completely Right Information to Readability and Model”.

Dreyer was inundated with questions inside minutes of the announcement, which got here whereas he was on the dentist.

“I used to be like, ‘All proper, everyone simply has to relax. I’ll be residence in a short while and I can get to my desk,’” he stated.

Whereas there may be widespread settlement that Walz’s is appropriate, confusion persists about Harris’ vs. Harris’s. Dreyer’s verdict? Add the ’s.

“To set the ’s is simply less complicated, after which you’ll be able to take your priceless mind cells and apply them to extra essential issues,” he stated.

Woloshun chimed in with an identical opinion on the social platform X, the place apostrophes are being thrown round like hand grenades. “The rule is easy: When you say the S, spell the S,” he argued.

That places them on the identical facet as The New York Instances, The Washington Put up and The Wall Avenue Journal — and at odds with AP.

Whereas AP type has advanced on many fronts over time, there aren’t any instant plans to vary the steering on possessives, stated Amanda Barrett, AP’s vp for information requirements and inclusion.

“This can be a longstanding coverage for the AP. It has served us nicely, and we’ve not seen any actual want to vary,” she stated. “We do know that the dialog is on the market and folks make completely different selections in the case of grammar, and that’s all fantastic. Everybody makes a alternative that works finest for them.”

Timothy Pulju, a senior lecturer in linguistics at Dartmouth Faculty, stated that till the seventeenth or 18th century, the possessive of correct names ending in S — similar to Jesus or Moses — typically was merely the title itself with no apostrophe or extra S. Finally, the apostrophe was added (Jesus’ or Moses’) to indicate possession, although the pronunciation remained the identical.

“That grew to become form of the usual that I used to be taught and cling to, despite the fact that looking back, I don’t assume it’s an important customary,” he stated.

That’s as a result of linguists view writing as a illustration of speech, and speech has modified since then. Pulju stated he expects the ’s type to develop into dominant ultimately. However for now, he — together with the Merriam-Webster dictionary — says both manner is appropriate.

“So long as individuals are speaking efficiently, we are saying language is doing what it’s purported to be doing,” he stated. “When you can learn it whichever manner it’s written, then it looks as if it’s working for individuals. They’re not getting confused about whose operating mate Tim Walz is.”

If she wins in November, Harris would develop into the fourth U.S. president with a final title ending in S and the primary since Rutherford B. Hayes, who was elected in 1876 — 130 years earlier than the founding of Twitter — and was spared the social media frenzy over apostrophes. Harris is the primary nominee with such a difficult final title since 1988, when Democrat Michael Dukakis misplaced to George H.W. Bush.

Dukakis, now 90, stated in a cellphone interview Monday that he doesn’t recall any comparable dialogue when he was the nominee. However he agrees with the AP.

“It sounds to me like it might be s, apostrophe, and that’s it,” he stated.

The Harris marketing campaign, in the meantime, has but to take a transparent place. A press launch issued Monday by her New Hampshire workforce touted “Harris’s constructive imaginative and prescient,” a day after her nationwide press workplace wrote about “Harris’ seventh journey to Nevada.”

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This story has been up to date to appropriate that Harris could be the fourth president with a final title ending in S, not third and that Dukakis misplaced in 1988, not 1984.