Part of my motivation for writing this column lo these many years is to help people who feel bad about their grammar to feel better about their grammar — not because I’m passionate about feelings but because I’m passionate about facts. The simple fact is that most people who feel bad about their grammar should not because we’re all in the same boat.
Very few, if any, of us native speakers took classes on whether “and” can start a sentence (it can), whether it’s permissible to end a sentence with a preposition (it is) or whether “between” is at times synonymous with “among” (it is).
There’s no secret language law library that shuts us out, and there’s no class in school that covered all this stuff on the one day we happened to be out sick.
Grammar snobs these insecurities by trotting out fake rules without revealing their sources. (If anyone ever told you it’s wrong to split an infinitive, they were repeating a myth.) But the language itself deserves a great deal of the blame. English is hard, so the idea that you should know everything about it sets an impossibly high bar.
Take, for example, terms like “farmers market,” “couples’ retreat” and “shopper’s paradise.” Is the first word in each a plural? A plural possessive? A singular possessive? Without knowing the answer to each, you can’t know where the apostrophe goes.
Editing styles and language experts agree that no one rule governs these terms. A plural like “farmers” modifying a noun like “market” may be functioning not as a possessive but as an adjective, meaning it requires no apostrophe. Think: shoe store. No possession is implied. In this interpretation, the idea isn’t so much that farmers own the market. The idea is that the market is about farmers. In fact, this is how most news outlets write it: farmers market, no apostrophe.
Or you could take the view that the market really belongs to the farmers, either in a literal sense or in a loose figurative sense. In that case, you could choose “farmers’ market,” plural possessive. Many top publishers do.
The singular possessive “farmer’s market” is less popular. I don’t know of editing styles or publishers that write it this way. But when you think about a farmer’s almanac or a shopper’s paradise, you could argue that “farmer’s market” is also a singular possessive.
“Shopper’s paradise” uses the idea of a single, fictional shopper who sort of represents every shopper. From that point of view, it makes sense to suggest this paradise belongs to that person. Hence the common practice of treating this as singular possessive.
“The chocolate lover’s package” does the same thing. The package is for “the” chocolate lover, aka anyone who fits that bill.
“Couples’ retreat,” “couple’s massage” and “couples therapy” illustrate how meaning affects punctuation. The retreat is for multiple couples, it’s theirs, in a way. So the plural possessive is a popular choice.
In a couple’s massage, there are (I assume) just two people getting a treatment, and together they form a single couple. You could argue the massage is theirs, hence “couple’s massage,” or you could argue the massage is about them the same way the market is about farmers, which justifies “couples massage.” The plural possessive “couples’ massage” seems less practical, though I suppose you could think of it as a service offered to all couples.
“Couples therapy” comes with a handy helper: Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. According to their online edition, the term has become so standard that it deserves its own entry, which they write with no apostrophe. That doesn’t mean you can’t take a different interpretation — especially if your meaning is a little different: the couple’s therapy is going well. The plural possessive, couples’ therapy, doesn’t seem as popular, perhaps because it implies at least four people sitting in one therapist’s office.
You can see why I’m so adamant no one should feel bad for not knowing how to write these terms. Besides, even if you don’t know, you probably get them right anyway.
— June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at [email protected].
