grammarsluts: unsolved mysteries

Q.

A.  Yes well that's simple but raises an infuriating interesting question.  Here's the basic rule about making compound nouns* possessive: if you're talking about two or more people's shared possessions, you use just one -'s for the both-or-more of 'em; however, if you're talking about multiple possessions that are not shared among the group, you've got to distribute the -'s's** like back in Algebra where 2(x+y) ends up equalling 2x + 2y.

     So the adventure or bogus journey shared by Bill & Ted is indeed Bill & Ted's, whereas when we recall that both Bill's father and Ted's father were at one point or another married to Missy ("Remember when she was a senior and we were freshmen?" "Shut up, Ted!"), we might be moved to say that Bill's & Ted's fathers married Missy or that Missy has been Bill's & Ted's stepmother.

     The problem comes in if we want to replace anything in there with a pronoun—and of course, you know, sometimes we do.  Obviously he or him would replace Bill or Ted; they or them would replace Bill & Ted; his would replace Bill's or Ted's; and their would replace Bill & Ted's—their excellent adventure, their bogus journey.***

     But now what if you're Ted?  Would you in fact have to call it Bill & my excellent adventure?  Some ambiguity automatically arises, as we might think you're talking about (1) Bill and (2) your excellent adventure; however, it's consistent with Bill & Ted's, which is right, and maybe the ambiguity is unavoidable.     

     The real fucker of a problem comes in if you're talking about Bill (or if you are Bill and don't follow the convention of putting yourself last in a series, which, let's be honest, Bill probably would not).  If you were just going to sub in a pronoun for Bill in Bill & Ted, you would say he & Ted or him & Ted, depending on whether these were subjects or objects.  And there's the rub: assuming you're talking about a shared possession, such that Bill & Ted's would be appropriate, would you say he & Ted's or him & Ted's?

     The problem, of course, is that Bill & Ted's, which is effectively adjectival, is not obviously either subject or object.  "Bill & Ted's bogus journey was bogus just by virtue of their having died and gone to Hell, but the very most bogus part of all may well have been the fact that Evil Robot Bill & Ted took over Bill & Ted's lives and mistreated their girlfriends": there the one Bill & Ted's is modifying a subject and the other is modifying an object, but that's all she wrote.  Maybe Bill & Ted's x = the x of Bill & Ted, in which case Bill & Ted are objects and it would have to be him & Ted's?  But a possessive feels more like a subject: maybe this is because of the way they taught us possessives when we were little kids, in which case never mind, but doesn't it sort of feel like a kind of mini-clause, like "Bill & Ted own this"?  I didn't say any of that.

     The answer may well be that the question is "wrong," like that story about the "missing $1," and that in fact when we say Bill & Ted's, the Ted's is not an entity unto itself in any way: maybe (looking back again to Algebra) what we've got is basically a pair of invisible parentheses, and Bill & Ted's = (Bill & Ted)'s—certainly that's what's happening grammatically—such that you simply cannot properly sub in a pronoun for either young man's name.  In other words, maybe once you've made the pair possessive, it's their or nothing.

     Yeah, you know?  I think that's it.

     And that's one to grow on.

* My grammatical Achilles heel is terminology.  E.g., I'm not 100% sure that "compound nouns" is the right term here, but you know what?  As many of us are brave enough to say about the things we happen not to be so good at, fuck it!

** Bonus Q'n'f'n'A: the -'s should never ever ever be used to make something plural (writing the Eighties as the 80's is particularly silly because you actually do need that apostrophe elsewhere—before the number—because it's an abbreviation: as Speak & Spell would say, the correct spelling of...the '80s...is T-H-E, apostrophe, 8-0-S) except when it's the only way, as in the case of A's, which without the apostrophe would look like a conjunction, or in the case of -'s's, which is very ugly indeed and maybe I would have been better off saying apostrophe-S's (Ss looking not at all like esses and rather a lot more like the sound some tropical tarantula makes before jumping on your face).

*** "All right, my sexual problem, my sexual problem!"