Apostrophe ess

A copy out of the desk had the headline printed in the newspaper as 'Court orders freeze on Dhaka Bank accounts of Abba's wife.' The mistake was spotted the next morning when the newspaper reached all its readers. This is an example of how mistakes develop at the layout unit, or on the stone, as they said in the olden days. In this case for instance, an editor, standing by the layout man with the page sprawling in QuarkXPress on the monitor before him, in passing said that this time it was Abba(s)'s wife (abba is the Bangla word for 'father') and the man doing the layout somewhow thought the word should be changed from Abbas' to Abba's.

The repoter in the evening claimed the headline was printed as he wrote it the previous night. And the editor who corrected the copy defended the reporter and said the reporter had written Abbas's and he changed it to Abbas' in consultation with another editor who also thought 's after Abbas might be somewhat incorrect, in which the Associated Press copies might have a role as Abbas', to mean of Abbas, according to the Associated Press Stylebook, is the order.

The house style of the newspaper says: 'possessive in words and names ending in s normally takes an apostrophe followed by a second s: Jones's, James's, this is mostly in case of modern names: use the plural apostrophe where it helps: Mephistopheles' rather than Mephistopheles's.'

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr, published in 1918, says: 'Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant.... This is the usage of the United States Government Printing Office and of the Oxford University Press. Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus''

The textbook Practical English Grammar by AJ Thomson and AV Martinet also says: 'classical names ending in s usually add only the apostrophe... other names ending in s can take 's or the apostrophe alone.' Both forms are correct. The newspaper prescribes its editors, and writers, to make the distinction between the ancient names and the modern ones. Abbas is a man modern, when it comes to grammar.