Blast From the Past: Possessives with names/words ending in "s"

[bluewolf458.livejournal.com]

The apostrophe (') may be the simplest and yet most frequently misused mark of punctuation in English. It was introduced into English in the 16th century from Latin and Greek, in which it served to mark the loss of letters.
And as editor Tom McArthur notes in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, "There was never a golden age in which the rules for the use of the possessive apostrophe in English were clear-cut and known, understood, and followed by most educated people." ( Read more... )