A grammatical question
11:27 am on the 26th of April, 2005By writing this post I think I answered my question but I’ll post it anyway so I can find out if I’m right or not:
Is it “each other’s” or “each others’” or something different altogether?
For example:
“having different backgrounds to draw on allows for better interaction and for peers to be each other?s mediator.”
OR
“having different backgrounds to draw on allows for better interaction and for peers to be each others’ mediator. “
April 26th, 2005 at 1:12 pm on the 26th of April, 2005
You should borrow the “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” book from your sister.
The apostrophe denotes that the noun following is owned by “each other”. It should be the first one. The second one doesn’t really mean anything.
I had always thought, though, that if something ends in ’s’, that you have an apostrophe afterwards, like:
But the book reckons this is just a slip which has come into English, and that the correct thing to write is:
But you should read that book. It’s short and informative, especially for poor souls like us who weren’t taught grammar at school.
April 26th, 2005 at 9:07 pm on the 26th of April, 2005
I already have the book but I was still a little unsure, turns out I was right.
April 27th, 2005 at 10:08 am on the 27th of April, 2005
In the example you give it should be each other’s. The way to test it is to write out in full what you mean by using the word “of”. In your example what you mean is “of each other”. So you replace the “of” with an ’s at the end of “other”, making “other’s”.
There might of course be situations where you mean “of the others” (where others is plural ie. refers to a group of more than one person). For example if you want to say “John wished he enjoyed the trust of the others in the class”, others is a plural, so it would become “John wished he enjoyed the others’ trust.”
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