Subject: Re: Xantus, Xantus', or Xantus's??
Date: Nov 28 10:22:41 1997
From: Hal Opperman - halop at accessone.com


At 2:02 PM -0800 11/27/1997, Kelly Cassidy wrote:
>On Thu, 27 Nov 1997, Hal Opperman wrote:
>> Does anyone really believe, because we call a particular hump in Colorado
>> "Pike's Peak," that it ever belonged to Zebulon Pike? Or that "Boyle's
>> Law" is the personal property of Robert Boyle and his descendants? No more
>
>It's Pikes Peak. The USGS did, in fact, decide that geologic features
>don't belong to anyone. No apostophes. The chemists, however, do let
>Boyle keep his law.

Hi Kelly and tweets!

USGS may have used that as a justification -- that geological features
don't belong to anyone -- but that was only a red herring to conceal the
traces of the *real* agenda, which was to standardize place names for
greater accuracy and consistency of information retrieval. To simplify the
rules, in other words, so there wouldn't be so many avenues of
interpretation (and potential error). "In the name of science" is another
way to state it. But what they have actually done is to exchange greater
certainty in one area for increased confusion in another.

If they were *really* on a mission to rid the world of private ownership,
then they would not just have banned apostrophes, but the whole convention
of adding an "s" to denote that a proper name was now functioning as an
adjective. In other words, we would have had "Pike Peak," not "Pikes."
The real USGS mission (admit it, guys) was to rid the world of apostrophes.

So we now have the worst of both worlds. To be politically correct (USGS
is a government agency, right?) *and* grammatically correct, we are in a
situation where, if Mr. John Pike goes out for a little exercise, it is
necessary to write that he "rode up Pikes Peak on Pike's bike." Plus, we
are now encouraged (or at least allowed) to believe that the person for
whom the peak is named was called, not Pike, but Pikes. Otherwise we'd
have Pugets Sound and Elliots Bay, right? Thanks, USGS.

Ah-hah, perhaps you are saying, so *that's* why they have those apostrophes.

But culture will out. There are at least a couple of wonderfully funny,
and sobering, Dave Barry columnns on the subject. He concludes that, in
popular usage, the only rule on the apostrophe is that it functions to
alert the reader to the imminent arrival of an "s."

Your's,

Hal Opperman