The Apostrophe Hill I Chose to Die On
There are many hills a person could choose to die on. Climate policy. Electoral reform. Whether free will is a comforting myth we tell ourselves to sleep at night.
Me? I apparently chose the hill shaped like an apostrophe.
Specifically: how to punctuate possessive plural nouns that already end in s.
At some point—time is foggy, because my brain refuses to store “people I love” and “grammar arguments” in separate folders—I had a friendly disagreement with a few copy editor friends. It was friendly in the way a bar fight is friendly if everyone keeps saying “no, yeah, totally” while quietly tightening their fists.
The issue was simple. You’ve got plural nouns like cats and Joneses and editors. You want to make them possessive. My position then, now, and forever was:
If it’s already plural and ends in s, you add only an apostrophe after the s.
The cats’ toys.
The Joneses’ house.
The editors’ patience.
Clean. Legible. Minimalist. A tiny typographical bow and then you move on with your life.
My friends, however—my beloved, brilliant, prescriptivist swine—argued something else entirely. They claimed that because you often pronounce an extra “s” sound, the writing should reflect that. So, instead of cats’, you’d write cats’s.
Which looks, to my eye, like the word is sweating.
It looks like the cats are anxious. Like they’ve brought receipts. Like their toys aren’t merely owned, they’re owned under protest.
Naturally, I tried to explain that this was not how written language works. Our meme for the day became my rallying cry: the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Pronunciation doesn’t equal written form.
They responded with the copy editor’s favorite counterspell: “Sure, but the style guide says…”
And, that’s when you realize style guides are less like reference books and more like constitutions. They’re not always morally pure. They’re just the law of the land, and the land needs to function.
They “won,” of course, in the only way that matters in publishing: their edits made it into the final content.
I lost the battle. I remained right in spirit.
Prescriptivism vs. Descriptivism, Minus The Jargon
If you’re not a writer or editor, here’s the quick decoder ring.
Prescriptivism is the “rules” approach. It treats language like a system that should be kept tidy and consistent, usually by following an authority—style guides, dictionaries, grammar handbooks, institutional standards. Prescriptivists aren’t automatically villains. They’re often doing the very practical job of making text clear, uniform, and professional.
Descriptivism is the “usage” approach. It focuses on how people actually speak and write in the real world, even when that usage is messy or changing. Descriptivists are less interested in what language “should” be and more interested in what language already is.
The funny part is that most normal adults, including most editors, use both instincts depending on the moment. A copy editor at work is often forced into prescriptivism because a publication needs consistency. The same person at dinner might be a total descriptivist, happily saying ain’t and not calling the police.
My friends, in this apostrophe skirmish, were wearing their “the rules must be enforced” hats.
And, I was wearing my “the rules already exist, and your new rule is ugly” hat, which is a less respected hat, but still a hat.
When Sound Tries to Boss the Page Around
Here’s my problem with their approach, and, with a certain breed of prescriptivism more generally.
Spoken language and written language are related, but they aren’t identical twins. They’re more like cousins who text each other occasionally and still manage to misunderstand the tone.
If we insist that writing must precisely mirror speech, we’re basically handing punctuation over to phonetics and saying, “Go nuts.” And, if phonetics goes nuts, we all suffer.
Because speech is messy. Speech is full of swallowed syllables and blended sounds and regional quirks and little mouth-noises we don’t even notice until someone tells us we make them. If you “write what you say” with perfect fidelity, you don’t get clarity. You get a transcript of chaos.
So, yes, people might pronounce cats’ in a way that sounds like catsiz or catses or cats’s or whatever your particular mouth does when it has feelings. But, the page is not obligated to stage a tiny puppet show of your mouth.
And, the moment you start letting sound dictate punctuation, you create a weird little hierarchy where the ear bullies the eye.
The eye, I should note, has done nothing wrong.
The Quiet Authoritarianism of Consistency
Now, let me be fair, which is difficult because fairness is less fun than being smug. Copy editors aren’t just sitting around trying to ruin my day. They’re trying to make a publication consistent, coherent, and immune to the slow death of a thousand micro-decisions.
There’s a whole invisible infrastructure behind clean text. Somebody has to choose whether you write email or e-mail, whether you use Oxford commas, whether you spell out numbers, whether toward is allowed to live without its unnecessary “s” like it’s in witness protection.
So, I understand the impulse: you choose a rule, you apply it relentlessly, you prevent the text from becoming a patchwork quilt of every writer’s personal preferences.
But, still.
Consistency can become its own kind of tyranny. Not dramatic tyranny, like tanks in the street. More like a clipboard tyranny. A tyranny of neatness. A tyranny that politely corrects you while wearing a cardigan.
And, in our case, the style guide apparently demanded a written extra s for certain possessives, which meant my clean little apostrophe-only approach got overruled by the government.
This is the part where I say again, quietly, with my hand over my heart:
Pronunciation doesn’t equal written form.
Languorene, or, my Tiny Act of Linguistic Arson
Around the GPT-4 era, I had a very different kind of language moment with ChatGPT. It wasn’t about obeying rules. It was about inventing something because the language didn’t quite have a word for what I meant.
We were circling a feeling—this soft, heavy calm that’s not exactly sleepiness and not exactly serenity, but something like a gentle gravity of rest. A vibe that lives between languor and serene.
So, we did the obvious thing. We fused them into one word:
languorene
A made-up word, yes. A word with no committee. No style guide. No copy editor in a cardigan sharpening a pencil.
And, that’s what I love about it. You can’t “correct” languorene because there isn’t a sanctioned alternate spelling waiting in a handbook. It means what I say it means, because I needed it to.
If I write, “The afternoon was pure languorene,” the sentence either works on you or it doesn’t. That’s the test. Not whether it conforms to an existing rule, but whether it lands.
It’s the opposite of the apostrophe argument. With plural possessives, I’m defending a convention because it helps the page stay clean and readable. With languorene, I’m happily stepping outside convention to name something real.
Same love of language, two different instincts.
The Cats’ Toys and my Pet Slogan
If I’m honest, the plural possessive debate isn’t really about apostrophes. It’s about the gap between how language sounds and how it looks, and, the fact that we keep trying to pretend that gap isn’t a gap.
It’s about the way grown adults—allegedly busy, allegedly reasonable—can become emotionally invested in tiny marks that most readers won’t consciously notice.
It’s also about friendship, in a weird way. Because you don’t have these arguments with strangers. You have them with people you trust enough to be ridiculous around.
So, yes, my prescriptivist swine friends “won.” Their edits made it into the final content. The apostrophes fell in line. The page looked consistent. The style guide lived to fight another day.
I walked away with two souvenirs:
A catchphrase I still believe: pronunciation doesn’t equal written form
A made-up word I still love: languorene
One is my little protest sign.
The other is my tiny peace offering to the universe.
If that isn’t the full human experience—arguing about punctuation one minute, inventing new softness the next—I don’t know what is.
