POSSESSIVE: A STUDY OF BOOK-TITLES

If there is one particular advantage possessed by the Teutonic over the
Romance languages in idiomatic clearness and precision it is that
conferred by their ownership of a possessive case, almost the sole
remaining monument to the fact that our ancestors spoke an inflected
tongue. That we should still be able to speak of "the baker's wife's dog"
instead of "the dog of the wife of the baker" certainly should be regarded
by English-speaking people as a precious birthright. Yet, there are
increasing evidences of a tendency to discard this only remaining
case-ending and to replace its powerful backbone with the comparatively
limp and cartilaginous preposition. This tendency has not yet appeared so
much in our spoken as in our written language, and even here only in the
most formal parts of it. It is especially noticeable in the diction of the
purely formal title and heading.

That the reader may have something beyond an unsupported assertion that
this is the case, I purpose to offer in evidence the titles of some recent
works of fiction, and to make a brief statistical study of them.

The titles were taken from the adult fiction lists in the Monthly
Bulletins of the New York Free Circulating Library from November, 1895, to
March, 1897, inclusive, and are all such titles as contain a possessive,
whether expressed by the possessive case or by the preposition "of" with
the objective. Some titles are included in which the grammatical relation
is slightly different, but all admit the alternative of the case-ending
"'s" or "of" followed by the objective case.

Of the 101 titles thus selected, 41 use the possessive case and 60 the
objective with the preposition. This proportion is in itself sufficiently
suggestive, but it becomes still more so by comparing it with the
corresponding proportion among a different set of titles. For this purpose
101 fiction titles were selected, just as they appeared in alphabetical
order, from a library catalogue bearing the date 1889; only those being
taken, as before, that contain a possessive. Of these 101, 71 use the
possessive case and 30 the objective with "of." In other words, where
eight years ago nearly three-quarters of such titles used the possessive
case, now only two-fifths use it, a proportionate reduction of nearly
one-half.

The change appears still more striking when we study the titles a little
more closely. Of those in the earlier series t