Grammar Girl here today is all about names. I have a quick and dirty tip about how to make

names that end in junior, possessive, and a meeting middle about generation names, such

as millennial. Let's get started.

Donald Trump Jr. has been in the news a lot the last couple of days, and I've seen some

pretty funky punctuation on that junior part of his name. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day,

we talked about whether you should look at that word, junior, and put a comma before

it. I told you people were more likely to use a comma in the past than they are today.

The AP style book, the Chicago Manual of Style, and I recommend that you don't use a comma.

It is a style choice, and the New Yorker uses the comma, which led to someone writing

a headline that read, Donald Trump Jr.'s love for Russian dirt. Donald Trump, comma,

junior, period, comma, apostrophe, s. It's a traffic jam of punctuation.

On Twitter, Michael Colton, a film and television writer, complained about the punctuation in

a tweet that right now has more than 13,000 likes. And he's pretty funny. Today, he's

joking that he just sold the rights to his tweet to Lionsgate. At least, I think he's

joking.

Understandably, the New Yorker got a bit defensive. Andrew Boynton, the head of the copy

department, wrote a response explaining the punctuation. Essentially, saying the magazine's

style is to put a comma before, and also therefore after, junior. And when that's your style,

when you have to make a name possessive, that's what you get. It might look bad, but

it's correct. I've never seen a style that says it's okay to put a comma in the middle

of a word before the apostrophe s. And Chicago seems to specifically recommend against it.

But that's what house styles are about. You get to say, this is how we do things here,

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