The New York Times and Its Irritating Apostrophe S Policy

The newspaper’s approach to this matter is dumb

Dear New York Times,

I’m here to discuss your style guide’s eccentric stance on how the apostrophe s should be handled for the possessive singular case.

On one hand, you’ll have:

Jeff Bezos’ wedding
Pope Francis’ death

But on the other hand, you’ll have:

Eric Adams’s campaign
Michelle Williams’s performance

Worse, you will sometimes have both instances — with the apostrophe s; without the apostrophe s — in one story, as you can see from this headline and an accompanying paragraph from Maureen Dowd’s piece:

Why does this happen? It happens because of your bizarre obsession with sibilance. Sibilance? What does sibilance have to do with anything? From your style guide:

“Gee, I’m about to use ‘Midas’ and ‘Douglas’ in the possessive case, but I forget which takes the apostrophe s and which one doesn’t! Damn it, I can never get this together!”

Why do you put your writers through this? I understand the exception for some long-standing idioms — “for goodness’s sake” is something nobody would say, though I have no objection to “for appearance’s sake” — but outside of those,¹ doesn’t it make sense to have one punctuation rule for all the letters in the alphabet?²

This simple rule is this: “When denoting the possessive case for words in the singular case, add an apostrophe and an s.” Boom. Done. And from there pronunciation can take care of itself.

Let’s look at my Texas example. Take that word and make it a possessive noun to modify “population.” Now, say the two words out loud. Did you hear what you said? Using phonetic spelling, you said “Texas-izz population.” That “-izz” is the apostrophe s. So in what world is it routinely acceptable to say the apostrophe s but to not have it appear in print?³

Now, say the headline to Maureen Dowd’s piece. This is what you get: “President Midas-izz Terrible Touch.” Right? Which is to say “President Midas’s Terrible Touch” is the only way to go.

Common sense should rule the day: If there’s a punctuation rule that’s intended for all the letters in the alphabet, it’s madness to exempt one letter from the rule because of how it sounds because the sound of a word has nothing to do with the punctuation rule.

So, New York Times, will you continue to mess with your writers’⁴ heads? Let’s see what tomorrow’s paper brings.

Barry

Postscript, April 21, 2026: The paper did it again! In a piece from April 19 titled “The Warmongers Are Getting History All Wrong,” they have this sentence: “The most famous vignette in Thucydides’ ‘History’ is the Melian Dialogue” and this sentence: “Athens’s shift from benevolent hegemony to malevolent empire paved its road to ruin.”

¹. From L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between: “It was thought to be a disused game larder, put under the yew tree for coolness’ sake…” I’ll agree that “for coolness’s sake” seems weird in the same way “for goodness’s sake” would be. But forget about dropping the s for names from antiquity. Or to quote from Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, the former copy chief at Random House: “I’d even urge you to set aside the Traditional Exceptions for Antiquity and/or Being the Son of God and go with: Socrates’s, Aeschylus’s, Xerxes’s, Jesus’s.” Dreyer has more to say on the subject here.

². I’ve also seen the letter z come in for pointless trouble. Look at this ghastly thing that I once saw online: “Tim Walz’ appearance.”

³. I’ve had some people tell me that it’s an option to drop the s. What “option”? We have a punctuation rule that applies to all the letters in the alphabet? Why exempt one letter from this rule? Are you suggesting that if a word ends with an s that an apostrophe s isn’t needed to denote the possessive case because, what, the s at the end of the word performs some kind of double duty? Madness.

⁴. Yes, for the plural possessive case you only need the apostrophe. “The kittens’ toys” (there’s more than one kitten that has toys) is correct. So why do people drop the s for the singular case? My guess is that when people were taught, correctly, to drop the s for the plural case, they somehow got it into their heads that the s should be dropped everywhere in all instances of the possessive case. Or maybe people unthinkingly fell for the weird double-duty explanation (see footnote 3).

Barry Lyons is a freelance writer living in New York City. He’s written about the Second Amendment, the true meaning of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and, on a lighter side, the Indiana Jones movies.