Your grammar has opinions about who counts as a real person. It expresses those opinions constantly, in every sentence, and you've probably never noticed. The tell is a single apostrophe followed by the letter s.

The 's vs. 'of' Test

English has two ways to show possession. You can say "Trump's tweet" or "the tweet of Trump." Both mean the same thing. But which one sounds right? Which one do you actually say?

That choice isn't random. Linguists call it the genitive construction, and your brain makes the call based on something surprising: how alive the thing is.

Animate things get the 's. Inanimate things get 'of.' And the more human the thing is, the more strongly you prefer 's.

A 2008 analysis measured this by searching Google for both forms and calculating the ratio. A ratio above 1.0 means people prefer 's. Below 1.0 means people prefer 'of.'

The Animacy Ladder

Here's where it gets fun. The ratios form a clear hierarchy. Named politicians, specific and very human, score at the top:

• Giuliani: 8.14
• McCain: 5.34
• Clinton: 4.13
• Obama: 3.42

Your brain defaults hard to 's for real people. Now watch what happens as you slide down the animacy scale. Countries score much lower:

• America: 0.863
• Canada: 0.443
• England: 0.227
• Belgium: 0.127

And chemical elements? Rock bottom:

• Lithium: 0.035
• Arsenic: 0.018
• Silicon: 0.0086
• Hydrogen: 0.0048

Nobody says "hydrogen's electrons." Your grammar knows hydrogen isn't going anywhere.

Where It Gets Weird

Modern corpus data from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and NOW (News on the Web) makes the picture even stranger. Some highlights:

Secretariat, the racehorse, scores 1.75 in COCA and 1.87 in NOW. Solidly above 1.0. He was technically a horse, but he was also famous, named, and treated like a person by millions of people. Your grammar paid attention.

Donald Duck scores 1.00 in COCA, 1.07 in NOW. A fictional character lands right on the line between animate and inanimate. Make of that what you will.

Now here's the question the title promised. God scores 0.75 in COCA and 0.68 in NOW. Satan scores 0.77 in COCA and 0.64 in NOW.

Almost identical. And both well below 1.0.

This could mean that supernatural entities, despite being worshipped or feared as persons, get treated linguistically more like institutions than like humans. Or it could mean that "God's plan" and "the plan of God" genuinely compete in a way that "Obama's plan" and "the plan of Obama" simply don't. The data doesn't say why. Just that it's true.

The Senate, for the record, scores 0.19 in COCA. A body of named, very human individuals becomes grammatically almost as lifeless as a country. Collective nouns blur the person-ness right out.

This Pattern Is Getting Stronger Over Time

Here's the part that really caught linguists' attention. Analysis of State of the Union messages and the Corpus of Historical American English shows the animacy effect has grown. The 's construction has been increasing steadily in relative frequency for animate referents over time.

And the shift hasn't happened evenly across groups. The group that moved fastest toward 's? Children. Then women. Then men.

One interpretation: as cultural recognition of a group's personhood increased, the grammar followed. Language reflecting social change in real time, measurable in apostrophes. That's not a small thing.

What This Means for Your Word Games

None of this directly helps your Scrabble score. But it tells you something genuinely useful: your grammar intuitions aren't arbitrary. When something sounds "off," there's usually a real pattern underneath it.

If you've ever felt that "the leg of the table" sounds perfectly natural while "the table's leg" feels slightly strange, you've felt the animacy effect firsthand. Tables aren't persons. Your grammar noticed before you did.

And if you want to make any noun feel more alive, more like a character rather than a thing? Give it the 's. Your readers' brains will respond differently. They won't know why. But they'll feel it.

Source: Languagelog