Living, as I do, near Bishops Corner, not far from Corbins Corner, in easy reach of a Walgreens and a Marshalls, not to mention Lyons Gulf service station, I wasn[’]t completely surprised to learn that the United States Board on Geographic Names has clamped down on the efforts of citizens in Thurman, N.Y., to name a nearby mountain Jimmy’s Peak. They[’]ve been removing (in what, misheard, might sound like a different form of mutilation) “the genitive apostrophe and the ‘s’” since 1890, after all, though “the Board’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.”
I was surprised, however, to discover that there are warring groups devoted on the one hand to the apostrophe, genitive or otherwise, and on the other to its defeat. Of course, the apostrophe hasn[’]t been around all that long—only since the 16th or 17th century, depending on its…