1006. We look at why the pronoun "I" seems to take plural verbs, and then we talk about a grammar topic that's in the news: how to make names that end in S (like Harris and Biles) possessive.
1006. We look at why the pronoun "I" seems to take plural verbs, and then we talk about a grammar topic that's in the news: how to make names that end in S (like Harris and Biles) possessive.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we'll talk about why the pronoun "I" seems to take plural verbs and how to make names that end in S possessive.
by Neal Whitman
A Grammar Girl follower named Aaron Heintz asked, “Why do we use plural forms of verbs with the singular subject ‘I’. e.g. ‘I go to the store’?”
When he talks about singular and plural, he’s talking about what grammarians call number, but the assumption that “go” is a plural form is not entirely correct. In addition to number, verb forms can also encode tense and person.
English has different types of pronouns
Here's a quick overview of the concept of grammatical person:
The first-person singular pronouns are the forms of “I,” including “me,” “my,” “mine,” and “myself.”
First-person plural pronouns are forms of “we.” "We go to the store."
Second-person pronouns are the forms of “you.” In present-day English, we don’t distinguish between singular and plural for second-person pronouns, except for the singular form “yourself” and plural “yourselves.” “You” can refer to one person (“you get the passenger seat” ) or many people (“would you please form a line in front of the counter?”).
Third-person singular pronouns are the forms of “he,” “she,” “it,” and more recently, "they."
Third-person plural pronouns are also the forms of “they.”
Now let’s look at the verb “go” and how it can give information about all three of these things — number, tense, and person. In the form “goes,” the “-s” ending tells us not only that it’s in the present tense, but also that its subject is third person singular: “he,” or “she,” or maybe “Squiggly.” So the answer to why the singular verb “goes” doesn’t agree with the singular subject “I” is that “goes” is also third person, while “I” is first person. They don’t match.
If “goes” is the third-person singular present tense form, then what form is just “go”? The short answer is that it’s the “everything else” form for the present tense. Traditional grammar books will often list this same form five times, for first- and second-person singular, and for first-, second-, and third-person plural. But from a learning perspective, it’s easier just to think of “go” as a form that can take on whatever combination of person and number you need in the present tense, other than third-person singular.
The technical term for this kind of situation, in which one word form can fill more than one function, is syncretism [sink-reh-tism], and English has a lot of it. In fact, we’ve already run across a couple of cases of it, such as the second-person pronouns, where “you” can be either singular or plural.
In older stages of English, there were different pronouns for second-person singular and plural. The second-person singular pronouns were forms of “thou,” and “you” was used for the plural. But these days, “thou” isn’t used in everyday English, and instead, “you” serves as both a singular and a plural second-person pronoun.
In fact, “you” is even more syncretic than that, because it can act as either a subject or an object. For comparison, the first-person singular pronoun is “I” as a subject, and “me” as an object.
Likewise, the first-person plural pronoun is “we” as a subject, and “us” as an object.
In older stages of English, “ye” was the subjective case of the second-person plural pronoun, and “you” was the objective case.
The difference shows up clearly in the King James translation of the Bible, in John 8:32: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” These days, “you” does the job of both, and “ye” is only used by speakers who want to sound like old-timey sailors. So with this double dose of syncretism, instead of “thou,” “thee,” “ye,” and “you,” it’s all “you,” “you,” “you,” “you”! But we don’t say that we have four second-person pronouns and they’re all homonyms. We say that we just have one pronoun, “you,” which can be singular or plural, subjective or objective, as needed.
So how did English end up with so much syncretism? For plural verbs, it’s always been that way. Even back in Old English, the present tense for all three persons in the plural was the same form. To illustrate with an actual Old English verb, let’s take the verb that eventually developed into Modern English “deem,” as in "We deem you worthy of the prize." In old English, the plural present tense form for all three persons was “demaþ” [day-mahth].
By the way, if you look at the transcript for this episode, you’ll see that the word ends with a character that looks like a lowercase “p” with a vertical part that goes up too far. That character is called “thorn” and represents the TH sound. As Old English developed into Middle English, this “-aþ” suffix, like the one in “demaþ,” was lost.
The rest of the syncretism in present-tense forms came later. The next piece to fall into place was the first-person singular form. When the plural “-aþ” suffix was lost, the plural form ended up sounding almost indistinguishable from the first-person singular, which was “deme” [day-muh]. That just leaves the second-person singular form, “demest” [day-mest].
How did “demest” lose that “-st” suffix? Easy! Once speakers started using the plural “you” for both singular and plural, it was natural to use the same plural verb forms with it that they’d been always using.
The same thing happens today when speakers use “they” as a singular pronoun. They don’t say, “Does anybody know what they wants to order?” They say, “Does anybody know what they want to order?”
A webpage for a college class on the history of English talks about this development in second-person verb forms, and says that the poet Alexander Pope objected to using a plural verb form for “you” when it referred to an individual. According to the webpage, “for some time he used the pattern ‘you was,’ but abandoned it when his contemporaries condemned it as inelegant and vulgar.” These days, of course, grammarians don’t consider the “go” in “You go to the store” a plural form anymore. It’s second-person singular, or depending on your point of view, a default verb form that can perform the function of second-person singular.
And that’s how we ended up with just two verb forms for most present-tense English verbs — why we say things such as “I go to the store on Wednesdays.”
Thanks to Aaron for an interesting question. I’ll put the link for that class webpage on the transcript for this episode. It gives an interesting sociolinguistic history of how and why “you” edged out “thou.”
That segment was written by Neal Whitman, an independent writer and consultant specializing in language and grammar and a member of the Reynoldsburg, Ohio, school board. You can search for him by name on Facebook, or find him on his blog at literalminded.wordpress.com.
Sources
WikiVerb. https://web.archive.org/web/20130808103225/http://wiki.verbix.com/ (accessed 2013).
David Crystal. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 1995, Cambridge University Press, p. 44.
by Mignon Fogarty
It's been a few years since I talked about how to make names that end in S possessive, and with Kamala *Harris* became the Democrat's presumptive nominee for president and Simone *Biles* competing in the Olympics, it suddenly became a hot topic. I made a post about it on Threads that, as of this writing, has more than 150,000 views, so I think it's pretty clear that people are interested.
Here's the deal: There are two ways to do it, and which one you choose (or like) depends on which style guide you follow.
Associated Press style, AP style, is the outlier here. This is the stylebook used by most journalists and public relations professionals, and they write it with just a lone apostrophe at the end: Harris' campaign (written H-A-R-R-I-S-apostrophe). Yes, even though you pronounce it as though there are two S's (Harris' campaign), there is no final S on the end if you're following AP style.
This AP rule is for only proper nouns though — people's names and places' names — like "Kamala Harris' campaign," "Simone Biles' medals," and "Paris' skyline."
If you're using common nouns in AP style, then you add the apostrophe plus an S. So in "the class's homework" and "the hippopotamus's favorite song," you actually put an apostrophe AND an S on the end even though "class" and "hippopotamus" end with the letter S.
Now going back to proper nouns — those names like Harris, Biles, and Paris — most other style guides, including The Chicago Manual of Style, put an apostrophe AND an S on the end to make them possessive. So in Chicago style, you write about "Biles's routine" with "Biles's" spelled B-I-L-E-S apostrophe S.
Chicago used to make exceptions for names with two or more syllables that end in an “eez” sound and nouns or names that end with an unpronounced S. So they were saying you should write names like “Euripides” and “Descartes” with only an apostrophe and no extra S on the end, like in AP style. So you may have heard those rules, but the editors reversed their decision in the 16th edition of the stylebook.
But unfortunately, Chicago still has exceptions. That style guide still says to use a lone apostrophe when making place names that end in a plural ending with S possessive, like “the United States” and “Beverly Hills.”
So in Chicago style, you’d write about “the United States' medals” with just an apostrophe and no extra S at the end.
One thing all the style guides do agree on, though —there is one thing! — is that when you make plural names that end with S possessive — common or proper names — you add just a lone apostrophe.
So if you're writing about multiple Bileses, like the whole family, the plural is B-I-L-E-S-E-S. And if you're writing about the excitement of all those Bileses, it is "the Bileses' excitement" with just a lone apostrophe on the end of "Bileses" to make it possessive.
I've seen a lot of people not understand this, and I even had people argue with me about it in a post I made that went semi-viral on TikTok (which was wild) but this is no wishy-washy "there are different ways to do it" thing. The rule is clear: plural nouns take just a lone apostrophe after the S to become possessive. "The candidates' rally schedules." "The competitors' combined medals." "Candidates" and "competitors" have just a lone apostrophe on the end.
One thing I find interesting about this rule in general, is that a lot of people were just taught one way in school and don't realize it can be done two different ways, and it's not like most people were taught one way or the other way. It seems pretty split.
Another reason people get confused is that style guide recommendations have changed over the years — like with the Chicago "Euripides" rule — causing even more confusion. For example, a couple of people have told me they learned it without an extra S in Catholic school when they were kids, and I don't know, but I seriously doubt that decades ago, the nuns were teaching AP Stylebook rules.
Anyway, if you're feeling overwhelmed and are sure you'll never remember which way you're supposed to do it, or you don't want people to think you've gotten it wrong no matter what you write, sometimes there's a simple write-around. For example, instead of writing about "Harris's campaign" and "Paris's skyline" you can avoid the possessive altogether and write about "THE Harris campaign" and "THE Paris skyline."
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