It's about time for our possessives to do a reverse Pluto. Pluto, you know, used to be a planet. Then it got demoted. This is like a word being turned into a prefix or suffix. Well, my ...

After VERIFYING how to spell canceled (with one l or two), a viewer asked us to VERIFY another grammar inquiry you might have been breaking for years. Beth Miller from Guilford County asked, "Why ...

Martha Brockenbrough, the founder of National Grammar Day and the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, tells host Rachel Martin about what she has referred to as an "apostrophe catastrophe." The ...

Mark Twain’s encounter with a particular foreign tongue inspired an essay called “The Awful German Language.” Welcome to a new feature of this column. We won’t call it “The Awful English Language.” ...

In French, to show that someone possesses something, you use their word for “of,” which is “de”: La plume de ma tante. Spanish works the same way: La venganza de Moctezuma. Italian, too: Buca di Beppo ...

He walks softly and carries a big stick. He uses it to make marks that look like little sticks. He prowls the streets at night, terrorizing shopkeepers and sign makers alike. But I’m betting regular ...

The Mid Devon District Council in southwestern England made headlines recently when it proposed to do away with apostrophes on street signs, changing King's Crescent into Kings Crescent and St. Paul's ...

Whatever possessed Vice President Kamala Harris to pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, it probably wasn’t a desire to inflame arguments about apostrophes. But it doesn’t take much to get ...

It was a modest proposal to ditch the humble apostrophe. Who’d’ve guessed it’d cause such a fuss? Not the officials in southwestern England whose idea it was to abolish the smudgy little punctuation ...

It could go down in history as the Arkansas Apostrophe Act of 2007. Or maybe “Arkansas’s Apostrophe Act of 2007.” Last month, the Arkansas State Legislature passed a non-binding resolution declaring ...