Possessive form of names ending in S

Wow, that was not one of my best sentences, @ChickenFreak . I'm flat out blaming that one on my dyslexia. I was trying to say that the passive voice of the inner thoughts of my character who lacks confidence sounds more like the type of passive voice in @archer88i 's post.

 

Sorry, I am going to be brutally honest here in a rage of tough love.

The problem is that it is a stupid name. Jacob is a name that has been around for over a 1000 years. The reason it sounds so stupid to your ears to say "Jacobs's" is that it is stupid. Jacob's is already a possessive that we have heard a thousand times. So you are using Jacob's to refer to his ladder or plural like you know three Jacobs. You are taking a plural or possessive and adding another S unto it basically and anyone is going to think that sounds stupid as hell.

Now, some names that end with S sound fine with 's added at the end. This is because there is a vowel directly preceding the final S. Pontius's sounds fine because is has that vowel right before the final S. Chris is the same.

Now something like Hobbs End in regard's to a name of a town, it is Hobb's End <-- like it belonged or is named after Hobb. Then the ' is removed as it is a name of a town.

 

@Poetical Gore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobs_(surname)

 

Indeed. I have no idea what @Poetical Gore is talking about. It's like he's suggesting Jacobs is a made-up name, when in fact it's a perfectly legitimate and very traditional name that's been around for centuries.

 

Ah, I meant as a first name and not a last name (surname). My answer to your thing then would be to use the character's first name for the majority of the time.
Jacobs as a last name is reasonable.

 

Mine, too, but I can't use his first name because the point of view character is not on a first name basis with him.

 

The grand irony is, @OurJud , that "rules" cited by Strunk & White (or some of the other style guides, for that matter), aren't even the way many of us learned to write in high school and college. They stule guides are often, for whatever reason, used for consistency's sake as opposed to "correct useage" sake.

Some of the rules in style books, such as the one about eliminating commas when possible, were supposedly designed to make setting type for newspapers faster and easier back in the days when typesetters had to hand set type, so there's that.

The first day in Newswriting class, my first journalism professor, who was an old-school trenchcoat-wearing reporter type, said, "Forget about everything you're learning in Freshman Comp in that building over there. The rules are different here." He was pretty dramatic, so he may have thrown a Comp textbook on the floor for emphasis. I was too busy thinking "oh crap" to notice.