DeSantis’ Memos versus DeSantis’s Memos

Guess which spelling drives me nuts

It’s generally the case that punctuation rules tend to be applied across the board. Here’s a common rule: “Start a sentence with a capital letter.” Everyone knows this rule. There is no controversy involved when beginning a sentence with a capital letter — unless you’re bell hooks, which only goes to show there can be exceptions to almost anything.

But for our purposes here, there’s a simple reality about English: There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, and if you want to denote the possessive case when a word is in the singular case (note the plural: “the kittens’ toys”), you add an apostrophe and an s: Harrison’s guitar, Lennon’s harmonica, McCartney’s bass, Starr’s drums, and so on for all the other letters in the alphabet — except for…s? Why is s exempted from this rule as is so often the case with many (but not all) publications? To wit:

DeSantis’ Disney chief suggests ethics commission “weaponized” memo

DeSantis’ appointees ask judge to rule against Disney without need for trial

Some people will argue that the dropped s is done to avoid an issue with sibilance. Really? I’m supposed to keep track of how a word sounds when deciding whether or not to use an apostrophe s? This is madness. If an apostrophe s…