If I recall correctly, @ScottAlexander once commented (perhaps literally in an ACX comment) on the question of whether proper names ending in S should get possessive-ified with apostrophe-S or S-apostrophe. Google and LLMs are failing me. Perhaps one of you can hunt it down?
To resolve YES, we have to surface a comment from Scott (a subscribers-only post is ok) timestamped from before the creation of this market. I'm like 98% confident it exists. Anyone who remembers and can hunt down the link (including Scott himself) should take the free mana here. If you'd do the hunting conditional on a bigger market subsidy, just say the word.
1,000🏅 Top traders
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| 4 | Ṁ4 |
You might (or might not!) be thinking of:
In blog post My Bet: AI Size Solves Flubs, Scott uses the formation: "Marcus’ prompt".
User NASATTACXR replies with Strunk and White's position that [it should be "Marcus's", but "an exception should be made for certain historical figures, and give Jesus and Moses as examples."]
Scott replies, "I think Gary Marcus is a sufficiently important historical figure to get covered under the Moses exception."
If that's not it, there is also a book review where Scott references the 'greengrocer's apostrophe' as a class signaling game, but that's about using apostrophes in plurals, not possessive-izing things that end in S.
@Anna Dang, nice work! Absolutely what I was thinking of. I should've given you a chance to scoop up more of the free mana here. Lemme share my profit with you (are managrams still working?)
@dreev For the record, the google search that produced this (as the first result...going to NASATTACXR's comment) was>>> possessive "s'" site:astralcodexten.com
If anyone might remember the post it was under, this site allows you to do semantic search through both SSC and ACX posts. (For those unfamiliar with how semantic search works, you want to paraphrase an idea from the post.)
https://readscottalexander.com/