The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects.
The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects. Ordinarily you may speak of Dr Foster’s middle but not the night’s middle, or England’s middle or even my nose’s middle. It is not the end of the world (or the world’s end), and numberless counter-examples may be cited, some from long ago. But the established idiom is undoubtedly shifting.
Recently I read of thieves stealing lead from the church’s roof, instead of the roof of the church. ‘The Church’s one foundation,’ wrote Samuel Stone in 1866 (in the wake of the Colenso case), ‘is Jesus Christ her Lord.’ Here he personifies the Church as the Bride of Christ, as well as a building with foundations.
I find it particularly annoying when writers in newspapers resort to the possessive form of place-names to produce phrases such as ‘London’s Carnaby Street’. (Talking of streets, we are fast adopting the American habit of saying on Victoria Street instead of in Victoria Street. A.J. Lerner might have put Freddy Eynsford-Hill ‘on the street where you live’, and there might be a Nightmare on Elm Street, but we British still have a house in Half Moon Street and buy a joint at the butcher’s in the high street.)
While inanimate and abstract nouns sprout apostrophes these days, the possessive form of personal names and animate creatures are disappearing before gerunds. The dear old gerund is a derivative of a verb that acts as a noun, such as kissing.
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