“Martin will call a snap election as soon as he gets into office. Even if Chrétien hangs on until February, Everyone expects a spring vote at the latest. Go straight to the people and get a fresh mandate.
It ain’t gonna happen.”

Well, June 28 was technically six days into summer, but in fact Martin did drop the writ in the springtime.

I’m just sayin’. :)

Man-oh-man Paul is being especially indulgent with the pathetic post hijacking of which I am shamefully guilty.

My cat got lost, but not the Harpers’. (i.e. the cat of the Harpers did not get lost)
My cat got lost, but not the Harpers. (i.e. the Harpers did not get lost)

Assuming one had been cornered into expressing oneself thus, I mean. Would you tend to add a bit of bonus sibilance to the last consonant in Harpers’ that you wouldn’t add to the last consonant in Harpers? I have a feeling we tend to do that but you better hope you’re not at DefCon 1 when you do.

(ducks)

On the possessive of my name: I’m nostalgic all month because 20 years ago this month I began my internship, and my professional career as a reporter, at The Gazette in Montreal. The style book there was written by Joe Gelman, and it had its ideosyncrasies, but I still know it better from memory than any style book I’ve worked from (or more often ignored) since. Joe wanted ‘s after words that end in s, and I was in no position to ask questions. I still do it that way today.

I think there are going to be a few of sics above.

We vote Wells’

Sorry, since it’s our name, we win.

:)

Sorry Jack. Google be damned.

My absolute all-time favourite piece of pedantry, really in a class by itself: the dying words of the French grammarian Vaugelas, who is said to have remarked as he expired, “Je meurs ou je me meurs; l’un et l’autre se dit, ou se disent” (I die or I am dying; you can say either, or both).

“This is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put”.

Well, that’s certainly the argument that we’ve heard from the BC Liberal Party in the last couple of elections vis a vis the BC NDP. But of course in that instance, the party in power is making a correct factual statement . . .

Actually the only time I ever got into a tangle with my publisher was about the genitive endings to classical names in my second book: they wanted Gaius’s and I was adamant about Gaius’ until . . . I ceased to be adamant and just went with the flow. Thus was a little pebble washed away from the dike that protects us all from what linguists call leveling, or the gradual merging of paradigms to eliminate perceived oddities; the genitive itself (with its peculiar little monosyllabic variant) being one of the last trees standing on the flood plain.

I think this says more about the way that journalists are bound to sensationalize and exaggerate the news. The least exciting possible outcome is always the most probable, but of course is also the least interesting from a journalistic point of view.

Rule 2 is an Ottawa insiders rule.

Rule 3 and 4 are perfect on their own.

“Wells’s” sounds good, but “Smithers’s” doesn’t.

1. the Separatist/sovereigntist movement in Quebec is dead;
2. the NDP in BC is dead (after Campbell first got elected);
3. the Liberal Party of Canada is going to govern us forever and we will never see another Tory government (that after Chretien’s threepeat and the initial election of Dithers);
4. (from south of the border after Bush the Second won a second term) the Democratic Party has been pushed permanently to the margins and the Republicans are the new consensus party in America (cf. the book The Right Nation); or
4. (the latest from south of the border, now that Obama is President) the Republican Party is dead (except in podunk states full of religious freakazoids & they don’t really matter anyway) and a new Democratic Party hegemony has been established to rule American beneficently ad infinitum . . .

and so on.

IMHO, which is not all that humble actually, in fact it’s pretty strident, this kind of shipshod rule-of-thumbing is the thin edge of the wedge for Jacobinism; instead, we should regularise and to make all monosyllabic nouns ending in a sibilant (/s/ or /z/ sound) take a genitive ending, while polysyllabic nouns ending in a sibilant would just take the apostrophe.

So, (A) Wells’s.

Ladies and gentlemen, please vote (and no peeking, and no googling):

(A) Wells’s

OR

(B) Wells’

The polls (poll’s? polls’?) close this evening at 10PM EDT, 7PM PDT.

I felt something was missing from this post, until I read THAT. Brilliant.

Four it is, Mr. Wells.

I guess Harper would have been smart to take the keys to Stornaway when offered then?