The apostrophe no one gets right

File this under “the more things change... the more clueless people stay.”

I came across an article filed by NBC News a few minutes ago on South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem getting caught in the middle of a culture war between social conservatives and business interests in South Dakota.

The subject of the article isn’t the point, but I’ll preface what I have to say with a couple of key excerpts, so you can see where I’m going.

“The legislation would have prohibited transgender women and girls from participating in girl’s and college sports in the state.”

“It is also the latest salvo in a nationwide Republican-led effort to keep transgender athletes out of women’s and girl’s sports...”

What’s wrong with these sentences? Look at the words “women’s” and “girl’s” in the second example. They’re both possessives, but they indicate, as written that, the sports in question belong to women in general, but only one girl.

This can’t be right. NBC News has achieved aesthetic consistency by putting the apostrophe before the “s” in both cases, at the expense of consistency on substance. It’s not just a typo, either. The reference to “girl’s” athletics is used not once or twice in the article, but three times.

Apostrophe apocalypse?

Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the folks at NBC News. We live in an age when apostrophes are routinely forced into plurals and even verb tenses, but expunged from company names like Starbucks and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. (The founder — who wasn’t named Popeye and named his business after a character in The French Connection, not the spinach-eating sailor* — once said he was “too poor to afford the apostrophe,” but whose online selections are on Popeye’s menu.

But the problem of what to do with the words “boys” and “girls” when describing athletic teams and events isn’t new. In fact, writers have been grappling with this apocalyptic (sarcasm intended) style problem for decades, yet they still haven’t figured out how to use this particular apostrophe consistently. I know because it’s a problem I confronted 35 years ago in my first job as a reporter, covering high school sports for the Tulare Advance-Register in California.

Back then, I was told by the journalism style gods that I was to refer to the Los Angeles baseball team’s infield as the “Dodgers infield,” because “it didn’t belong to the Dodgers.” The word “Dodgers,” I was duly informed, was an adjective that described it. This would have made sense, except the fact that when a pronoun (“baseball team”) is substituted for the proper name, it became possessive. You can look back at the previous sentence to see what I mean:

If you say it’s the team’s infield, to be consistent, you have to say it’s the Dodgers’ infield.

(It is, however, Dodger Stadium: That’s the formal name. It’s also, however, the Dodgers’ stadium, because it belongs to the team. It is not, however, in any instance, “Dodgers Stadium.” Thankfully, we have no such issue with the Cincinnati Reds, who don’t play at Red Stadium, which — although it does have red seats — is known as Great American Ball Park under the team’s current licensing agreement with an insurance company. But I digress.)

Pigheaded patrons of style

Such inconsistencies mattered not a whit, though, to the journalism style gods, who told me that the same adjectival principle applied to the use of words like “girls” and “boys” to describe various sports. We were “supposed to” write about girls basketball and boys soccer, without any apostrophe to indicate a possessive. The word, I was told, must be understood to be an adjective.

“Poppycock,” I said. “If that’s so, then why is there an apostrophe when we write about men’s basketball and women’s soccer?”

(I may not actually have used the word “poppycock,” but it sounds good here.)

To this day, no one has been able to answer that question. Do these sports suddenly become possessive when applied to adults rather than minors? Or are the adherents of the pro-adjective, anti-possessive crowd simply too pigheaded to admit that they’ve backed themselves into a corner: that, in order to be consistent, they’d have to employ the preposterous descriptors “men soccer” and “women basketball”?

No matter how strongly the pro-adjective forces feel, they can never bring themselves to do this, because they don’t want to be the object of scorn and derision. Even in the Wild West of modern journalism, where copy editors have been banished to wander aimlessly as outlaws through a tumbleweed-strewn wasteland of unemployment, readers would still notice how stupid that sounds and make fun of whoever wrote something it.

The ludicrous idea of talking about “women shoes” or “men cologne” exposes the plain fact that these words were always meant to be possessive, and therefore, they need an apostrophe. There’s no shame in admitting this. It would clear up one of the most intractable inconsistencies in journalism quite easily. But admitting they’re wrong isn’t something the gods of journalism rarely do readily, unless political pressure is applied.

There’s nothing political about this. It’s a simple matter of consistency, or lack thereof.

A simple solution

We can now circle back to the NBC News article, which, to its credit, acknowledges that these words should be possessive when placed before words describing gender and sport, regardless of whether we’re talking about adults or young people.

What it gets wrong is how many people are doing the possessing. If you’re talking about women in the plural, you have to talk about girls in the same way. And that means you have to use the plural possessive form: “girls’,” with the apostrophe after the “s.”

This isn’t rocket science, brain surgery, or even a challenge akin to keeping your facts straight on Star Trek canon. You’re not dealing with multiple universes here. You only have two things to stay consistent about: sports played by adults of different genders, and sports played by youths of different genders. Easy peasy.

Which is why it’s so befuddling to me that something I figured out as a rookie reporter 35 years ago continues to stump people who’ve been in the business for decades.

One final note: When I became sports editor of the Tulare Advance-Register after two years as a reporter, I adopted a style policy of referring to girls’ and boys’ basketball, with the apostrophes gloriously and unapologetically displayed after the “s.” I did so proudly, and I did so consistently. Why? Because I was in a position to make the rules, and I figured it was better to be right (and consistent) than follow the crowd.

Yeah, that still gets me in trouble.

*A tidbit I learned in researching my latest book, Highways of the South.

Featured photo by David Groehning, Creative Commons 2.0 license