Weird Punctuation Decisions

[deird_lj]

I’ve been corrected in the comments to my last post for pluralising “Mary-Sue” incorrectly.

And while part of me wants to wave my editing course in people’s faces and go “I know better than anyone! Hah!” and another part of me wants to change it so that people won’t think I am bad at punctuation, I thought it might be more interesting to make a post about it – because I’m obsessed with language, and find this stuff far too fascinating.


Yes, I did check my textbooks before posting. And they… disagreed.

Let’s look at a boring and normal name.

Mark

Original word: Mark
Possessive form: Mark’s (as in “This is Mark’s hat.”)
Plural form: well, it’d be “Marks”, right? After all, simple English plurals are made by sticking an S on the end – that’s really all that has to be done.

Which would be all well and good – if all names were names like Mark, Luke, and Katherine.


However…

Louis

This one already has enough debate over the possessive form. (Is it “Louis’s hat”, or “Louis’ hat”? No-one’s quite sure.) Add in the possibility of more than one Louis, and there’s a whole new issue.

If there are five people called Louis in one room, are they the “five Louis”, or “five Louises”, or “five Louiss”?


Buffy

If Buffy clones herself, are there “two Buffys”, or “two Buffies”?
(Jane Espenson prefers Buffies.)


Henry

Has England had “eight King Henrys”, “eight King Henries”, or “eight Kings Henry”?



My textbooks disagree. One recommends a different style for each name – “Marks”, “Louis’s”, “Buffys”, and “Kings Henry”, respectively – one says “do whatever you want, just be consistent”, and one says to use apostrophes: “three Mark’s, five Louis’s, two Buffy’s, and eight King Henry’s”.

I decided to go the apostrophe-adding route, even though I knew it would look like I was mixing it up with possessives.




So: was I right? Or wrong? Or should I have done something completely different?
Tell me in the comments!

Comments

[deird1]

I'd say it's fine for short paragraphs, but when used over and over it starts making sentences fairly ambiguous - too many things that could be "they" in the one example.

I rather like the way RPG books handle things: D&D alternates between "he" and "she", and the Buffyverse RPG says flatout that women are the heroes in the Buffyverse, so "she" is used as the default.

One of my books on editing has "she" used for the author and the editor, and "he" for the publisher and the designer...

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

Heroquest says in the introduction that they will use "she" for the Narrator/GM and "he" for players, as a default throughout. Similar to your last example.

Alternating pronouns sounds logical, until you get he GM beig referred to as "he" then "she" then "he" again all within the course of a single paragraph. :-)