Writing & Grammar: Qualifying Possessives

by Jennie Ruby 

A frequent reader of this column, Michael Stein, sent in an interesting question about the possessives we have discussed here recently:

Perhaps you could address possessives again in an upcoming column. Specifically, how should a qualifier be added concerning a person in a sentence who possesses something. For example, "We played with John's, the kid who lives in the white house, ball." Is this correct?

Here are my thoughts on this gnarly problem. In his email to me, Michael observed that in the spoken language, we would say,

We played with John, the kid in the white house's ball.

And in fact, there is a sound grammatical grounding for that.

A description in commas right after a name is called an "appositive." The Gregg Reference Manual, my favorite guide for such things, says to add the possessive to the end of the appositive and omit the trailing comma that would ordinarily belong there. The examples, however, are short, as in these:

Washington, DC's streets

Joe the plumber's bill

But I think that in a professional writing context, or with longer appositives, this falls apart and becomes awkward and possibly even confusing:

We saved the file in Tim, the manager for the project's shared folder.

Yech. And is it the project's folder, or Tim's folder? And the way this comes out, it actually means that Tim is not the manager of the project but just of the project's folder. Even the Gregg says to rewrite such sentences to avoid the awkwardness.

So we pretty much have to go for the re-write in order to both identify the person and make the person clearly possessive:

We saved the file in the shared folder belonging to Tim, the manager for the project.

Or

 We saved the file in the folder shared by Tim, the manager for the project.

Or (and I don't dislike this one as much as Michael does)

We saved the file in Tim's shared folder. Tim is the manager for the project.

Long-time readers may sense a pattern here: for many of these awkward, confusing grammar and punctuation conundrums, my solution is to rewrite the sentence. No sentence is sacred. Every sentence can be rewritten. Keep rewriting until everything is correct and works smoothly.

Challenge: Rewrite Around Awkwardness

1. Margie, my sister in Baltimore's house has a sump pump.
2. The tree with the hanging swing's strong limb is beginning to bend.
3. The day on which her son is to graduates's date is May 30.
4. The cabin with the gravel driveway's fishpond overflowed last week.
5. The golf cart with the broken wheel's driver was not injured in the crash.

As always, please post your answers as comments below.

***

Answers to the challenge on single quotation marks are brought to you by Jenny Zoffuto. Her clean-looking examples for numbers 1, 4, and 5 come from not giving special treatment to the defined word when the sentence is clear without it.

1. In a client-side application, the accessing computer does the calculations.
2. The instructor said; "As Laura LeMay stated in the assigned reading, 'For more control over your sounds, you'll need different software.'"
3. Her boyfriend said, "The top song on my favorite radio channel says, 'You are perfect in my mind,' and I think it is talking about you!"
4. "The Wicked Ale effect," according to my colleague, "Is a marketing technique for covering several media at the same time."
5. A picture placed directly in the text, rather than floating, is called an in-line graphic.

Alternative correct answers came in from Kay Honaker. Notice what she did with the Wicked Ale example (no. 4). The single quotes are not the British usage, but are in fact what happens to double-quotes when they occur inside of an already double-quoted sentence. Nicely done!

1. In a "client-side" [or client-side] application, the accessing computer does the calculations.
2. The instructor said, "As Laura LeMay stated in the assigned reading, 'For more control over your sounds, you'll need different software.'"
3. Her boyfriend said, "The top song on my favorite radio channel says, 'You are perfect in my mind,' and I think it is talking about you!"
4. "The 'Wicked Ale effect,'" according to my colleague, "is a marketing technique for covering several media at the same time." [also could be done without quoting the colleague, and just putting quotes on the defined word]
5. A picture placed directly in the text, rather than floating, is called an "in-line" graphic.

Correct answers also came in from Ginny Supranowitz. And I missed one from last time: Ginny should have been listed as a winner on the British spelling challenge. Thanks for letting me know!

Comments

[Dennis Hammel]

1. My sister Margie's house, in Baltimore, has a sump pump.
2. The strong limb in the tree, with the hanging swing, is beginning to bend.
3. Her son graduates on May 30.
4. The fishpond at the cabin, with the gravel driveway, overflowed last week.
5. The driver of the golf cart, with the broken wheel, was not injured in the crash.