A Word, Please:

It is a well-known fact that soon an overweight individual in a loud-colored ensemble and who has the ability to stop time will once again do just that. His purpose, as we all know, is to enter our homes through our chimneys — even the homes of those who don’t have chimneys — to deposit quantities of merchandise made by elves in the North Pole who have the magical power to make them look exactly as if they were made by Mattel and (here comes the real magic) to not get sued.

Yes, it’s the time of year when we carve the turkey, yet we gobble up the tripe — everything from “No payments till January!” to refusing to ask ourselves whether this breaking-and-entering saint well-known for his love of children enjoys the legal protection of the Catholic Church.

So, with the holiday spirit in my heart and my hogwash detector on overload, I dedicate this week’s column to some of the many language lies that, like so much bad eggnog, keep coming back to haunt us.

Take poor Teri of city unknown, who wrote:

“I learned, back in the early ’50s, that to be a possessive the word must be animate.

Therefore, a car’s trunk was incorrect because a car, being inanimate, cannot possess. Was this ever correct? It certainly made life easy as to which word got the apostrophe and which did not!”

This sounded like hooey to me. So I opened my “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” where I found: “Possessives of nouns denoting inanimate objects are generally unobjectionable. Indeed, they allow writers to avoid awkward uses of ‘of’ — e.g. ‘the book’s title, the article’s main point, the system’s hub .?.?.’ The old line was that it’s better to use an ‘of’ phrase rather than the ’s to indicate possession when the possessor is an inanimate object .?.?.?. As a general principle, though, whenever it’s not a violation of idiom, the possessive in ’s is preferable: ‘the hotel’s front entrance,’ ‘the earth’s surface.’”

As I told Teri, my guess is that, years ago, someone noticed the oddness of saying “the car’s horn” because it’s usually people who own things. But I think that observation got overstated somewhere along the line. Then somebody started shoveling it out to others to others as “truth.”