Do you remember when Midsummer Madness used to mean falling asleep with sand in the hollow of your back under a wooly one-piece swim suit? (Suit?) Or gathering a sandy handful inside your bathing trunks (Trunks, like in Sherwood Forest?). That was when estival insanity meant watching Puck, Oberon and Titania trying to ride Nick Bottom turned jackass on a makeshift stage in Central Park. Or did you doze through a rain flavoured performance among Regency splendour in London tortured by mosquitoes and the inaudible? “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”, especially in their culture-vulture version.
That was back in prehistory before we started the dress rehearsal for end-times and got ready to add the final flourish of punctuation, the last dot-period-fullstop. No more pipe dreams of fleeing to Utopia in New Zealand when the taxman bites. Down there they’re shooting each other too and the climate has gone awry. Australia looks on as its green turns to a deeply-baked brown. Immigrant bashing has become okay in a country made of immigrants and the few natives that escaped genocide. English Canadians used to be the grownups of the Northern Hemisphere. Now they are North America’s bad boys sucking up every drop of oil like Yankee drill-babies. They are punished with wildfires the size of Belgium that send clouds of lumberjack smoke over Manhattan. Back in the stepmother country, once the United Kingdom, things are worse. The Conservative Party that furnished a strong if self-serving spine to politics is no more. The Labour party is floundering on the right as it grabs for the no-real-change centre. Don’t get sick or you will learn patience and join the queues. The shortest one is to the undertaker’s. The new special relationship with the USA is an aping of the family Hominidae, unLatined as the Trumps. The floored republic on the other side of the Atlantic has crumbled. The pieces of its jigsaw no longer fit. The partisan Supreme Court doesn’t want to put them together. Trump got it right. Who said you can’t say anything you please? Do it and no one will stop you. 50% of the voters will come along to the show. That’s Entertainment! Don’t tell them about the dangers to democracy. Their passions are elsewhere. They are fighting the good fight for things like the shade of a politician’s skin or the way to write apostrophe S.
Yes, the grammarians are in full battle dress and swinging all the harder as electronics take the pen from their hands and attribute literacy to their dumb thumb. Why not to their big toe?
Said the London Guardian, in an article of August 14 that we will pillage: “Harris’ or Harris’s? Apostrophe row divides grammar nerds”:
“The lower the stakes, the bigger the fight,” said Ron Woloshun, a creative director and digital marketer in California who jumped into the fray on social media to offer his take on possessive proper nouns less than an hour after the vice-president selected Walz last week.”
The danger arose when Harris became the presidential candidate and Harris’ or Harris’s campaign began. Who cared? A maniac part of the social media ilk who pulled their virtual hair when she named her vice Tom Walz raising the threat of seeing Tom Walz’s written.
The experts, as usual, were ready to fight to the death over their personal takes on ’S or plain S. One said, ‘for singular proper nouns ending in S, e.g., Jesus’ words, Dickens’ novels, the z of Walz was to be treated as an S.
Got it? The other side of the library said no. The rule was simpler: “If you say the S spell the S.” Right, as simple as Simple Simon’s autistic nightmare.
Further expertise: “Names ending in S normally take an apostrophe and second S when possessive , BUT be guided by pronunciation and use only when it helps.” (Helps who?)
Never mind. Chew on the article’s conclusion:“If she wins in November, Harris would become the fourth US president with a last name ending in s and the first since Rutherford B Hayes, who was elected in 1876 – 130 years before the founding of X – and was spared the social media frenzy over apostrophes. Harris is the first nominee with such a tricky last name since 1984, when Democrat Michael Dukakis lost to George HW Bush.”
Now that sterling bit of trivia will keep you from asking whether a Harris win will mean she will desist with Biden’s ineffectual resistance to genocide in Gaza or if Trump will triumph and complete regression to pure cornfed America Firstism with mushroom clouds on the horizon.
Wake me after the apocalypse’s big pop although I may have no breath left for the final S .
Comments