Comments on: A grammatical question

By: James

James — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 09:08:35 +0000

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.”

By: stuart

stuart — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:07:03 +0000

I already have the book but I was still a little unsure, turns out I was right.

By: Lord of All

Lord of All — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 12:12:02 +0000

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:

Chris’

But the book reckons this is just a slip which has come into English, and that the correct thing to write is:

Chris’s

But you should read that book. It’s short and informative, especially for poor souls like us who weren’t taught grammar at school.