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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 8th August 2007

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.

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