Ode on a Grecian URL

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Punctuation is your friend! So am I, usually.

If Charles Dickens owns a hat, that hat is Dickens's hat. If Frederick Douglass owns a cat, that cat is Douglass's cat. The possessive s is obligatory when forming a surname that ends in s unless that surname belongs to a figure from Biblical, Classical, or Old Testament times -- e.g. Jesus' mat, Socrates' bat, and Moses' rat.

:: posted by Mike, 8:52 PM

This is the class blog for English 167 (The Novel in 19th-Century England) at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, sections 312 and 313, for fall 2006. Lectures by Prof. Ortiz-Robles; discussion lead by Mike Shapiro.