Where do I put the ' ?

[~Wingnut~]

Hi all!
Hope someone can help me quickly as I am typing out a leaflet for someone's business (they want it now to take to the printers) and I don't want to get this wrong.
Where would I put the ' in
"Sarahs mobile hairdressing"

Not sure if it's Sarah's or Sarahs' or if it is needed at all! My mind has gone blank!

Thank you for any help :o)

[Quizmonster]

Sarah's means 'belonging to Sarah, so that's the way to do it.

[bednobs]

sarah's = belonging to sarah

[~Wingnut~]

Thank you Quizmonster, you star! :o)

[~Wingnut~]

Thank you also bednobs, you posted the same time as me! Your a star too :o)

[bednobs]

best way to remember is to make it into an "of the" sentance (ie the mobile hairdressing of sarah) and if it ends in "s" put the apostrophe after the s, but if if it dosent end in s then the apostrophe goes before the s. Ok, so that sounded easy in my head!

[~Wingnut~]

That's a great way of remembering bednobs! Thanx for the top tip!

:o)

[Quizmonkey]

Bednobs: now explain St James's Park :) Just joking - I remember writing to Ladybird Books about the many apostrophe anomalies in English when I was at primary school...

[bednobs]

i think institutions and organisations are allowed to have their own rules arent they?
the "Of the" rule has always sttod me in good stead
the boy's hats (the hats of the boy)
the boys' hats (the hats of the boys)

ps, qm, did you have any friends at school :-)

[jno]

just think, Quizmonkey, if you'd waited a decade or two you could have been Lynne Truss and rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

[THECORBYLOON]

What about the folk who work at McDonald's, are they McDonald's' employees?

[Quizmonkey]

I wasn't that much of a nerd - it's just we were doing punctuation and the Ladybird book seemed to contradict what the teacher had just told us!

Funnily enough, JNO, I wrote a published article about the apparent death of proofreading; high street stores abandoning the apostrophe; default-font apostrophes cropping up everywhere; and typos even on the blurbs for Stephen Fry novels. A year later Eats Shoots and Leaves came out...

[idly_enjoys]

CORBYLOON, that McDonald's question deserves its own post, I need an answer now!

[Quizmonster]

Idly, Quizmonkey - note that I am Quizmonster - wrote this morning about "High Street stores abandoning the apostrophe"...thus we no longer have a Barclay's Bank but only a Barclays Bank and so on. So the question of a double-apostrophe such as - jestingly, I hope! - TCL suggested.

[Quizmonster]

"...does not arise" was somehow forgotten at the end of my answer above.

[jno]

so near and yet so far, Quizmonkey... like the apocryphal guy who invented a soft drink called 5-Up; it didn't sell so he came up with another one called 6-Up... then he died. But I think you're right about proofreaders. Newspapers are, on the whole, no worse than they used to be, but modern books are seemingly unread by anyone before publication. I learnt good English by reading it, but where are kids supposed to find any these days?

[heathfield]

The apostrophe is commonly used in English to represent missing letters, So as a youngster the way I used to remember where to place it was to mentally say 'Jack his books'. The apostrophe then took the place of the letters 'hi' in 'his', making 'Jack's'. (Male or female gender didn't matter). Thus I'd still think of 'Sarah his mobile hairdressing' to arrive at 'Sarah's mobile hairdressing'.

[bednobs]

but that dosent make any sense at all!

[heathfield]

Oh, all right, I should have said 'in the case of the posessive tense'.

[jno]

Heathfield's answer is quite possibly the way the language actually developed. In older English you can actually see 'Jack his book' in some texts, which seems to have become abbreviated to 'Jack's book', though I believe there's some disagreement about this.

[smeghead81]

Sarah's

comma used in the possessive, cos it is Sarah's hairdressing co.