The discussion of possessive took me back to research I did years ago about the history of the possessive apostophe. It is so odd that the apostrophe has two such different uses, showing omission and showing possession--and combined with the different roles that the s ending plays, it certainly confuses students. The omission/contraction apostrophe dates back to the Greeks and in English it became popular and relatively standard in the early 1600s; Shakespeare contributed to the trend with "'tis" and so forth. Around that time, this omission use evolved into the possessive use as well through several unplanned and haphazard routes. One route was the reaction of grammarians to the unpleasant doubling of the s sound when a plural became possessive; an s was omitted and an apostrophe used (still indicating omission, but the new possessive sense became implicit), as in The House of Lords, The Lord's House. Another route to the possessive apostrophe was the contraction with the word "his" when it came after the noun, as in "the king his son," "the king's son." (This theory was less popular at the time than it has been since. The word "his" referred at the time to females as well as males, so there were constructions such as "Her Grace his request.") A final route was the dropping of the letter e from the spelling when it became silent in the speaking; thus, "the Lordes Supper" before the sixteenth century, "the Lords Supper" in the sixteenth when the e was no longer pronounced, and "the Lord's Supper" at first to indicate an omission and, by the eighteenth century (when the usage was standardized), possession. I also like to think that one historical circumstance that hastened all this was the fact that through most of the seventeenth century, England was ruled by kings whose name ended in s. Two Charleses and two Jameses. Imagine all those court printers and London copy editors sitting around trying to give some consistency to phrases like "King Charles's proclamation." The uncertainty that kicked off our discussion--about "Columbus's discovery"--takes us back to the heart of the matter in the 1600s, when the English were, like us, trying to reconcile those multiple s sounds with the rational use of that ancient mark. Brock To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/