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“Yes,” I replied, “Davy Jones isn’t a biblical figure.”

“Could be a lot of Wite-Out,” Benjamin repeated. “You sure about this one?”

It occurred to me that while the path of correction had seemed obvious to me, given the style book that the League had more or less chosen to follow, Benjamin was not lugging around the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition, in his brain like a mental brick. I had internalized its tenets only through the years of my academic publishing job in D.C. I couldn’t expect my companion, adept hunter though he was, to have absorbed the book’s contents purely by walking through the reference section every day.

There is widespread confusion over what to do with these s-possessives, partly because no absolute rule exists. Different style manuals diverge where Davy Jones possesses his locker. Each style guide aligns its rules with its overall purpose. Associated Press style has the mission of eliminating anything deemed unnecessary for communicating an idea, such as the serial comma (e.g., the second comma in “Benjamin, Jeff, and Josh”). They see that same redundancy in an s following an s-apostrophe. You’re already ending on an s-sound, why add another s? The style I’d learned to use, Chicago, which is favored by the publishing industry, aimed to simplify the rules themselves; thus, Chicago would prefer to keep things consistent, adding an s after the apostrophe and thereby treating s-ending possessives like any others. (Chicago does make an exception for names from the Bible and antiquity that end in s, like Jesus or Xerxes.) The Modern Language Association (MLA) style, employed by academic writers, prefers this route as well. Though it helped that at least a couple of style guides backed my desire to use the s after the apostrophe, I knew deep down that my preference did not spring entirely from reason: I simply liked the way that JONES’S would look better than JONES’. Perhaps this was how style guide variances happened in the first place.

After I’d explained the competing views about the s-apostrophe situation, Benjamin suggested that we could go with whichever best preserved our supplies. That, of course, would be AP style. Denied the wholehearted support I had sought, I grew defensive. “Are you at heart a spelling minimalist, old friend? Do we part ideological ways here? Is that it?”

“Hey … I only want the simplest means to the end of correcting this typo, yo.”

I reflected a moment more. “This could be the first time we’ve come across something with two possible corrections. For the sake of consistency—even if that’s a silly consideration for different signs in different contexts across different states—we ought to correct with Chicago. That’s what I’ve been using, more or less, so far.”

“Okay, I’m cool with that,” he replied. We couldn’t very well switch typo-correcting parameters mid-journey, any more than a grad student could swap MLA for APA mid-thesis. I turned back to my plywood canvas and went to work. We would have to hope that the cop stationed a block away wouldn’t look over and take us for vandals. The bad kind of vandals, I mean.

Perhaps I should have considered Benjamin’s words as a harbinger of comments soon to befall the League. I’d been proud of my handiwork afterward, the painted-on s making a respectable attempt at fitting in with its stenciled brethren. Some folks in the wider world later scrutinizing our adventures expressed their disapproval with the correction, however, especially when the Boston Globe article on us ran a week later and used the Davy Jones pictures as an example of our typo-fixing. The entry on the TEAL blog filled with comments such as these:

You could have saved some white paint by adding only the apostrophe and not the (extra) “S”

I too had always been taught that words ending in “s” did not receive an additional “s” when they become possessive. A little controversy with your morning coffee?

I can state with confidence that AP style does not put the extra