Over breakfast I handed the Resident IT Consultant a post-it note. I’d been reading an obituary in the Guardian, and shuddered at what I saw, and decided at long last to discover if I’ve been wrong all these years (so unlikely), or if I had made it up.
The dead woman had married ‘a friend of her brother’. I need for it to be ‘a friend of her brother’s’ but who am I to say? Fifty years of reasonable fluency proves nothing.
He looked at it, muttered something about dative (I wish he hadn’t!) and then agreed that he would expect the possessive too. But he asked what I’d been taught about dative, and I informed him that the first time I was made aware of it was when learning German where you simply can’t avoid it.
If we do dative in Sweden, I must have imbibed it with the proverbial baby milk. Similarly with English; where I have managed quite nicely to avoid grammar at most times and have no wish to begin now.
But the Resident IT Consultant is a thorough man, and he knew where to look things up (Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage), which to my shame I didn’t know, nor that we have a copy (of course we do), or where it would be.
And it seems that this brother of the bride and his friend are an example of the double possessive. Fowler’s appears to believe that ‘my’ version is the better one, although you can obviously say whatever you like in whatever way you prefer. It’s just that I have seen it so much, recently, and it’s getting more and more common. Since the Guardian has a style guide – I think, anyway – one has to assume they have opted for a more single possessive.
Languages evolve. And so they should. It’s just that it grated on the eyes. And I suddenly feared I’d spent fifty years being wrong, because what’s learned early has a tendency to stick. Even when incorrect.