Grammar Girl here, I'm Minion Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language, writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today, I have a meeting middle about compound possessives.

In other words, how to write about it when two or more people share something like a

house or beliefs.

And I have a quick and dirty tip about using the word ON before a day of the week.

A listener named Katie wrote in with this question, how do you show possession to more than

one noun?

For example, would you say Tom and Jerry's TV show and Ryan and my anniversary?

The latter looks so odd that I end up avoiding it entirely and going with a longer and less

sufficient, Ryan and I are celebrating our anniversary on da da da da.

Thanks for the question, Katie.

What you're asking about is called compound possession or joint possession.

I'll start with the first part of your question.

If you're trying to write about possession and you have two subjects that are nouns,

you have to decide if the two people possess something together or separately.

If the two people have the thing together, then they can share the apostrophe S. If they

don't share the thing, then they can't share the apostrophe S either, they each need their

own.

So to use your example, if you're talking about Tom and Jerry's TV show, they're the main

characters on the same cartoon about a cat and mouse.

Essentially, they share the show.

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