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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

I knew of a building named Water's Edge, but spelled "Waters Edge". The absence of a possessive apostrophe was bothersome but I realised there's a case for sacrificing correctness for things like ease of communication and how the words look.

An insight from Oscar Wilde:

> Mr. Noel, in one of his essays, speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to sense in poetry. No doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do. But he himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton's music. In the modernised version he provides of the wonderful Songe to Ælla, he mars the poem's metrical beauty with his corrections, ruins the rhymes, and robs the music of its echo. [1]

(^^ that's from a short but wonderful essay, worth reading!)

[1] https://ia800203.us.archive.org/23/items/collectedworksau12w...

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But Waters Edge is totally fine if they mean "by the edge of the waters" and not "the edge belongs to the water".

But hey, there are no rules or logic in English so have at it!

I think I understand:

I thought about trees:

Tree leaves (leaves from a tree)

Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree)

Same logic for water:

Water edge (an edge that happens to be of a body of water)

Waters edge (same but of more than one body of water)

In tree leaves, it could be leaves from a single tree or multiple trees. Hence, you can't pluralize tree into trees leaves, tree isn't allowed to recieve a plural there. If you write it as tree's leaves, then tree is singular, and the form is possessive (whereas before it served to disambiguate from, say, leaves of a book). Then you can also pluralize tree to trees' leaves, and now it's leaves from multiple trees.

Would the same logic also invalidate ‘waters edge’?

> Tree leaves (leaves from a tree)

or it could be the single tree is vacating the area

> Trees leaves (same but from more than one variety of tree)

or multiple trees are vacating the area

we could equally turn edge into a verb as well. so now we have a whole other meaning outside of an apostrophe

Hadn't even considered that. I think that confirms "waters edge" can be grammatically correct. (random example: "as rain falls, flood waters edge closer")

I'd add that "waters" doesn't need to mean more than one body of water. It can be used somewhat poetically to refer to water in a single body. First example I could find: https://biblehub.com/joshua/3-8.htm

Hmm, it seems like water can be plural or singular purely depending on the author's preference. I didn't realize that until now.

Yeah, that could totally be by design. For example,the book "Rainbows End" is not "Rainbow's End" specifically because the meaning of the first is intended, not the second.

Though when it comes up in the book it's clear that it was a mistake (or a cruel joke) in that context.

In the book's context. But in the meta-context of why it's in the book, the author's intent is to fool you into thinking it's a mistake, when it actually isn't. Specifically, it's supposed to suggest the technological singularity not being a pot of gold but the death of history (and possibly humanity).

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