Twenty busy minutes later...

I was tired and thirsty and kinda fed up, so I thought I'd make a cup of tea and read some Burroughs*. Obviously, that entailed going into the kitchen, to boil the kettle and so forth.

These days, I am apparently incapable of going anywhere in the house without thinking of what else I should be doing. In this instance, the notion of dinner occurred to me, in that, "Well, while the kettle boils I could..." sort of way. So now Wednesday's barbecued pork is simmering in a pot with onions and carrots and celery and tomatoes and pinto beans and garlic and a whole lot of spices, mulching down into a chilli; and the rice is cooked and ready to fry up with green onions and mushrooms and more garlic; and all that I need to do for dinner is the brussels sprouts.

And now it's after five o'clock, which puts tea entirely out of the question, boiled kettle or no. And I'm still tired and thirsty and kinda fed up, and I really need to be getting back to work. Beer, I hear you calling me...


*Edgar Rice of that ilk, as it happens. I was such a fan of the Tarzan books when I was small, I never bothered with the Mars books at all. We are now, ahem, making up that lack.**

**And trying not to think "Oh, if only I'd been around then! I could have done all this so very much better!" That is a snare and a delusion, as we know. Though honestly, they really are an endless series of "With one bound I was free," which does get a little wearing...

Possessively yours

So growing up as I did with a name ending in -s (shh, it's a secret!), I have never been any stranger to the vagaries of the possessive apostrophe - which may in fact be one reason why I never had any trouble with its basic rules either, because I had to learn an exception early. The genitive form is 's, unless the word ends in -s already, in which case it's just the apostrophe: is it Tina's turn, or is it Charles'?*

Being the stickler that I am, and pretty much self-taught, I am tolerably convinced that my early books feature my doing the same thing with words ending in -ss, because why wouldn't I? Except that then I remember reading in some manual of style that that was wrong, that -ss takes the genitive 's: it's not the princess' poodle, it's the princess's poodle.

Which I was quite happy to buy into, because of course it was a different case and needed different case-law; so I've been religiously holding to that ever since. Until, as it happens, today: when I was copy-editing away and here was and for goodness sake and it so clearly needed an apostrophe - and it struck me suddenly that no one ever in any circumstance ever has ever said "Oh, for goodness's sake!" It is, incontrovertibly, "Oh, for goodness' sake...!"

So: is there an actual rule here, or is it just custom-and-practice, with variations? Does goodness take the bare apostrophe because it's followed by another s anyway, on the front of sake? That feels to me like it could be a rule (I am trying out variants in my head here, and I think I could say "for goodness's comfort," if it only made sense, so it may just be that concatenation of sibillants that creates a special case), but I do not know. I am ignorant. Anyone want to enlighten me? Like Brutus, I pause for a reply...


*A question not uncommonly asked in our household**

**(and rarely answered fairly; she got twice as many turns as I did. House rule. A pestering sister's a festering blister, say I.)