I have a street in a town near me which grammatically should be called St. Thomas' road. However, the street signs call it St. Thomas road at the north end and St. Thomas's road at the south end.
Not quite related to apostrophes, but I feel the need to point out my favourite street name of all time (as read on a street sign): St John St
(-> Saint John Street)
Thomas' is not grammatically correct in any version of English that I know. It's not plural. There is no special rule for that. Both the street signs you mentioned are at least grammatically coherent
It is trivial to find more than sufficiently authoritative source that cover the rules that make "Chris'" and "boss'" perfectly value contracted possessives in English. [1]
However, it's English: there isn't just one rule, another rule can also be valid and might be the one you're familiar with on a day to day basis. That doesn't mean any other way to say or write the same thing is wrong, it's just a pattern you never saw. Like someone going "lol snuck isn't a real word, it's sneaked!" and then you hand them a dictionary and they learn something new about their own language.
> Some writers and editors add ’s to every proper noun, be it Hastings’s or Jones’s. There also are a few who add only an apostrophe to all nouns ending in s.
> ..One method, common in newspapers and magazines, is to add an apostrophe plus s (’s) to common nouns ending in s, but only a stand-alone apostrophe to proper nouns ending in s.
> Examples: the class’s hours; Mr. Jones’ golf clubs; The canvas’s size; Texas’ weather
"Some writers" say that the French Foreign Legion has been deployed to the front lines in Ukraine too. We must take this very seriously, then!
Some writers write things like Four Fat Harvard Girls Lose Book Bag too. They use sentence fragments. They try to save ink by doing weird shit. Professional Buzzfeed writers write AF (yes, in caps) to mean as fuck. The Atlantic used the words electroöptical and rôles in 1940. Just because some minimum-wage burnout or penny-pinching editor breaks a rule doesn't mean that the rule doesn't exist.
If you go around the office saying that someone drank out of the boss' mug, they'll think you're fresh off the boat. Not only is it wrong in written English, it's not even accepted colloquially in spoken English, anywhere. And so it makes perfect sense that the written form would reflect the pronunciation.
Saying Texas' weather out loud just confuses people into thinking you're using it as an adjective when what you're really doing is trying to sound smart when you're actually sounding dumb. If you point at a book and say, that's Chris', you sound like you have brain damage. How is the book Chris'?
Chris is a person, not a book! The only reason that people don't correct you is that they're being polite. And people misspell words all the time and the world doesn't cave in. That doesn't imply any particular thing about English grammar.
Another commenter found that you can say Jeff Bridges' because this is an irregular case to avoid saying the same sound twice—an exception which proves the rule (and also, I don't think it's irrelevant at all to point out the fact that Bridges is literally a plural noun made into a name). But Thomas is decidedly not in this narrow category. His source even uses Thomas' as an example of what not to do, lol. Normally I wouldn't dumpster someone this hard but hn rate limits so I may as well lengthen my response. Nothing personal.
Rules, especially in English, are not grounded in any agreed-upon authority and never have been, tracing all the way back to Chaucer more-or-less codifying the written form of the language by simply writing one story that then became the most popular English printed work for a generation.
Try not to lean too hard on how other people use the language just because it ain't how you use it. Makes you look outta touch with the way folks are playin' around with one of our shared human comms protocols, neh?
> but hn rate limits
Not in general. Only if you've proven yourself to be a poster for whom the mods think that rate-limiting you improves the health of the discourse 'round these parts.
That's exactly his point. You don't hear the apostrophe but you do hear the "s," meaning that Thomas and Thomas' cannot be distinguished. And so Thomas's must be used instead.
The spoken and written language are not the same thing. Even if you say "Thomas's," sources disagree on whether you write "Thomas's" or "Thomas'", because the latter is more consistent with the rules for other ends-in-s words and, therefore, easier to remember.
(My personal prediction: give it 100 to 200 years and we're going to drop the trailing 's' in all these cases. "Cat'" will just be pronounced "cats" and understood to mean "an adjective indicating the noun is owned by the cat").
It is easy to observe that this "rule" is false. Even though everyone pronounces it "thomases", some spell that "Thomas's", others spell it "Thomas'". It is a purely stylistic spelling difference, and both forms are in common use, in literate environments. So, there is no one rule about how this word is spelled. And since neither form reflects the pronunciation, both are purely conventional, they don't have a much deeper meaning to lean on.
