Grammatical request

[Crunchy Cat]

For whatever reason I have completely forgotten the correct use of the wordy buddy. Specifically if I want to refer to the name of a single buddy, which is correct?

"My buddies name is..."
"My buddy's name is..."

Help?

 

[invert_nexus]

"My buddy's name is..."

 

[Absane]

"Buddy's"

"Buddies" refers to a group friends.

 

[Beryl]

What invert_nexus said. "Buddies" would be more than one buddy... "buddy's" means belonging to a buddy, or else "buddy is" (but in this case, belonging to a buddy). That's the rule for most words: just an S is plural, apostrophe S is possessive, and S apostrophe is plural possessive (like "My buddies' names are...")

That was probably more information than you needed... I'm prone to rambling on about such things. But maybe it was of some kind of help.

 

[Crunchy Cat]

Thanks everyone. You have been very helpful as always

 

[Syzygys]

Just to confuse you:

My buddies' names are Hillary and Bill...

 

[Absane]

My buddy's buddies are very smart.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Clue:

For most words ending in a solitary Y (no preceding vowel such as EY or AY) the plural is formed by replacing the Y with IES.

The possessive is usually formed in the standard way. For the singular, add apostrophe and S. For the plural, add just the apostrophe.

My buddy called me today.
Several of my buddies played basketball with me.

My buddy's wife told me he was sick.
Two of my buddies' wives started a business.

Notice that if you write, "Two of my buddy's wives," you are implying that this one buddy has multiple wives. This is a rare case in English, where the written language is a tiny bit more precise than the spoken language.

 

[Syzygys]

My buddies' buddy is....me.

 

[Mr. G]

My buddies' buddy is....me.

Not necessarily. They make be just humoring you.

 

[Tiassa]

What's really screwed up about the underlying grammatical issue is that I'm reading Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories to my daughter, and for some reason, there's a passage that I can only find when I'm reading the story in which I'm pretty damn sure they've screwed up on who's and whose.

It's not like this is some hack house putting that one out. It stuns me every time. But for some reason I never get obsessive enough to write down the page number for future reference. (If I started doing that, I'd probably become one of those freaks with ten-thousand Post-It notes around my home, and only I would know what any of them say.)

At any rate, we're reading through it again, so it's due sometime next week. She's at her mother's this week. When I come across the passage, damn it, I will write it down.