Here is the big Natural State question on National Punctuation Day; Is it Arkansas’ or Arkansas’s

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Sept. 24 is National Punctuation Day and an excellent reason to bring up a matter of importance for all Arkansans.

The apostrophe is used to designate something as a possessive . “The journalist’s keyboard,” for example, is the keyboard belonging to the journalist.

Things get more complicated when you have a word ending with an S. “The boss’s office,” for example, is the office belonging to the boss, but what if the office belongs to a group of bosses? “The bosses’s office” would be a bit of a tongue twister; better to leave that one “bosses’ office.”

What about when a word has an S on the end but does not sound that way, like Arkansas? What about the natural beauty that belongs to Arkansas? Is it “Arkansas’ beauty” or “Arkansas’s beauty?”

The question is more complex than it would seem.

Journalists use the Associated Press Style Book for arguments like these, which plainly states that if it ends with an S, it gets the single apostrophe with no following S. So, by the AP Style Book it is “Arkansas’ beauty.”

The state legislature, however, got involved in this same argument in 2007. That year, it passed House Concurrent Resolution 1016 : “Declaring ‘Arkansas’s’ as the correct spelling of the possessive form of the name of our state.”

The HCR includes the statement that it was implemented to avoid confusion in official documents and publications. This means, by law, that it is “Arkansas’s beauty.”

An interesting aside, HCR 1016 was passed as a supplement to Concurrent Resolution 4 of the 1881 legislative assembly . Concurrent Resolution 4 determined that the state’s name was spelled “Arkansas” but pronounced “Arkansaw.”

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