Double whammies. Double standards. Double troubles. Double lives. Double
blows. Double acts. Seeing double? No, it is not one ‘double’ too many. Rather, it
is one s’s too many. Among the examples given, only one appears regularly either
as double standard or double standards. The rest are invariably used sans the ‘s’.
As a rule, you wouldn’t pluralise the noun when it is paired with ‘double’, would
you? It is simply un-English. A solecism at best. Seriously, do we want to make an
exception for ‘double standards’, but proscribe ‘s’ for all other similar
expressions? If so, this is simply double standard at its most illogical. Period.
In recent years, the tag-on ‘s’ has become endemic, particularly in Australian
public discourse and in the print media, especially mainstream newspapers.
Moreover, every so often ‘double standards’ also trips off the tongue of
politicians, newsreaders, and others with equally high profiles. They should know
better. The mainstream newspapers are even guilty of promoting two versions of
it in the same edition and within pages of one another. Have their wordsmiths
(armed with their style guides) been somnolent on their watch? All these people
are supposed to be standard bearers of good English. Small wonder the public is
confused. And so are our students.
The frequent appearance of double standard ending in an ‘s’ does not mean that
two wrongs make a right. Some, of course, will argue that language is always in
flux and one cannot be too dogmatic about usage. If this argument is taken to its
logical conclusion, then who is to say that we can’t inflect all the other double
expressions such as double acts, double troubles, and so forth. I don’t think the
public is quite ready to accept that. If so, this is a clear-cut case of making an
exception for double standard. This is incontrovertibly double standard!
Up to a point (and I say this with a caveat) that language – be it usage, meaning,
and grammar – must perforce be underpinned by logic and rules by and large
though not immutably so. But consistency is the name of the game. If it were not
so, we will be second-guessing one another in our everyday communication as we
adapt the language to suit our whims and fancies. When exceptions in language
use smack of arbitrariness, we will be hurtling down a slippery linguistic slope.
Worse, Australian English might even morph into a patois that the rest of the
English-speaking world will regard as non-standard or even inferior.
The spectral ‘s’ surfaces in yet another usage: the possessive case. Again, the print
media in Australia seem quite unsure when to add an ‘s’ to a person’s name or
thing to indicate possession, especially when the word already ends in an ‘s’. In
some cases, it is clear-cut: John’s car, Mars’ surface. Yet, at other times, utter
confusion reigns. Inconsistencies are often spotted in public notices,
advertisements, and more glaringly so in mainstream newspapers, sometimes in
the very same article, for example, Harris’ car, Harris’s car, Dr Seuss’ story books,
Dr Seuss’s story books. Not unexpectedly, this inconsistency then surfaces in our
students’ writing, and are frequently not picked up by teachers who, themselves,
may not have sorted out these pesky ‘s’, and whose teachers and those before
them were equally remiss as well. Linguists attribute this to a phenomenon called
imperfect learning. With over 20 years of teaching English (as a first language) to
VCE students from state, Christian and private schools in Victoria, many with blue-
ribbon cachet, I can only conclude that the imperfect-learning phenomenon must
be working overtime down the generations.
With the possessive ‘s’, a simple rule applies. In the case of Harris, it should rightly
be Harris’s. When pronounced, the last syllable takes on a ‘sus’ sound. However,
when a name already ends in a ‘sus’ sound for its final syllable, then only an
apostrophe is required, for example, Jesus’ birthplace, Dr Seuss’ story books.
Should an ‘s be added to such names, it will eventuate in two ‘sus’ sounds being
created. For example, Jesus-us. That would be very clumsy indeed. In the case of
virus, an ‘s is still needed to create the possessive case – virus’s which still has
only one ‘sus’ sound. Again, our poor students cannot learn by example or
resolve it themselves when there is so much confusion and inconsistency in
marking the possessive case whichever way they turn to look for guidance. The
Americans, by and large, are fairly consistent in these matters, and so have dealt
with this decisively by marking possession simply by adding just an apostrophe
(sans the ‘s’) to names and words already ending in an ‘s’. The result is a national
In Australia, we seem quite blithe about observing rules of grammar – the
highway code of a language. This can only set us back further in our reputation as
one of only five core Anglophone countries in the world where English is spoken
as a mother tongue. As such, Australia should be the standard bearer of English
rather than a source of confusion and inconsistencies.