Let’s talk about possessive plurals.
It all began with the Presidents Club, which was something dreamed up by the Sales Department of the software company I used to work for, to entice its members to sell, sell, sell our product. The sales people were all (mostly) in the USA, and I was in Ireland, where head office lay. And somehow we in the Editing Department, desperate for work so as not to be downsized, had got our tentacles on Marketing Stuff and I was faced with proofing some internal baloney about how if you sold Lots and Lots of computer-based training courses, you too could become a member of the prestigious Presidents Club and go on a special trip to New Orleans next summer.
This may be something that all US-based sales departments have, but I was not US-based back then and had never been in sales, and I was very hazy as to what on earth all this was about. I sent confused e-mails back to someone in California asking what president this was, and how many presidents we were talking about here, and in what sense was this or was this not the club of/for/by/about one or more presidents. And whether they could not just call it something less ambiguous, please, instead?
Now that I’m older and wiser and know about Presidents Day, I am more forgiving of the presidents club. I passed more than one third Monday of February in this country before I acquiesced to those who forwent the apostrophe. I wanted it to be the day of all the past presidents, and therefore to be Presidents’ Day. But no! It’s not the day of them, it’s the day celebrating them, about them, if you will. So no possessive needed.
Looking back, I would now charitably assume that whoever invented the damn Presidents Club was modelling it on the eponymous Day, and I would just leave well enough alone. But that was then, and I can only apologise so much for apostrophes inserted where none were due.
But every week now for half the year, twice a week at least, I’m faced with a similar – but not similar enough, more’s the pity – conundrum, as from May or June on, I begin to see signs pop up on random street corners for a market where farmers gather to sell their produce directly to the public. A farmers’ market. Or a farmers market? Is it a market of the farmers, by the farmers, or about the farmers? I think we can all agree that it’s not a farmer’s market, unless it’s particularly tiny, but beyond that I’m no longer as decisive as I was in my confidently dogmatic youth. Perhaps the sign is merely telling me that farmers market. Yes, they do.
I’m not even going to try to tell you about the confusion that arose in my mind when I encountered the phrase “Laissez les bon temps rouler” in the same internal sales brochure. If only we’d had Wikipedia in 1999.