With all due respect to your GE, I would hesitate to take the opinion of any native English speaker at face value when it conflicts with what you've been taught by your English intstructors. Just because we speak the language does not mean we necessarily understand the minutiae of the rules of grammar.
I know what you're talking about.
In Greek - which is a far more difficult language than English - you can see this every day. Even teachers of Greek philology make mistakes, and big ones
However, I have three reasons to agree with the singular/plural theory of my GE:
1) When someone is a GE, you
expect them to be well aware of grammatical etc. issues.
2) Languages advance very quickly. A new TV show is enough to bring up many new quotes, which soon become widely used.
So, since all of my teachers have been older than 50 years old, I could think they use an "old" way to write, or a more formal one.
Example: You are out in London, Los Angeles, Metropolis... wherever. You ask someone what time it is. How many people would tell you "it's quarter past five"?
Almost no one.
Yet, this is the way I was taught to express the time.
3) It
sounds correct. I think it agrees with this theory Roger posted:
A second university website said you only append an 's if you pronounce another syllable after the name, e.g. lois-es would then be spelled Lois's, whereas a word like boys would only have a ' appended to it because you don't pronounce the plural, boys-es.
Anyway, even if the English philologists have decided and there IS something that is SURELY correct and something that is SURELY wrong (but, as far as you have let me know <g>, they haven't), I believe that such minor issues can't be considered as real mistakes. There are bigger issues, too, when you can doubt which one is correct, and there really isn't an answer (i.e., spelt or spelled? My brother's English coursebook says they're both correct).
Allow me to use an example from Greek here:
"We are" and "we were" in Greek sound the same, but they are spelt differently (είμαστε/ήμαστε, in case you can see the Greek characters on your screens).
A classmate wrote in his dictation the past form, instead of the present form he had to, in that text. He then copied the text on the blackboard, so that the rest of the students would correct his mistakes.
When the others corrected the other mistakes he had, I pointed that one.
My teacher's answer:
"Well, nowadays many people confuse these two forms... It's not really a mistake."
Although I believe this leads to forgetting our language (generally speaking, not only for Greek) and to using a newly formed, maybe stupid language, sometimes you can't convince the people to even correct the bigger mistakes... and the smaller ones, like the one we are arguing here about, are forgotten and used the way everyone wants.
But isn't it a great sign that we've not only got people who know some grammar, but we've got people who *want* to know more?
Yes, it is. I hope it keeps being like this.
AnnaBtG.
P.S.: I'm sorry for writing so much and tiring you... if you knew the history of the Greek language and its present situation you'd understand.
I just hope English won't have a similar future (although, with all these new versions of English we see lately, and the way I write <g> I'm not so sure about it).
P.P.S.: I'm also sorry for my pessimism - but I can't help it.
