Here is a grammar fact that will change how you hear English. You have two ways to show possession: the apostrophe-s and the "of" construction. "Obama's plan" versus "the plan of the committee." You choose between them constantly, without thinking. And the thing you are unconsciously measuring is whether something is alive.

The Numbers Are Weird

Linguist Mark Liberman analyzed this using massive text corpora, counting how often writers chose 's versus "of" for specific words. The ratio tells you how "animate" the English-speaking world treats each subject. The higher the number, the more alive we write them.

Politicians score highest. Giuliani's ratio in one analysis was 8.14 (1.14 million 's hits versus 140,000 "of" hits). McCain clocked 5.34. Clinton 4.13. Obama 3.42.

Then it gets interesting. Apple scored 2.41. IBM 1.73. Microsoft 1.67. Google 1.27. Corporations land in the middle, treated as more alive than countries but less alive than people. Which tracks, if you have ever dealt with a terms-of-service update.

Countries fall off fast. America: 0.863. Canada: 0.443. Thailand: 0.336. England: 0.227. Belgium: 0.127. The further a country sits from the center of political conversation, the lower the number. Something to consider next time you argue about national personification in Scrabble chat.

Chemical elements are almost purely "of" territory. Lithium: 0.035. Silicon: 0.0086. Hydrogen: 0.0048. Cadmium: 0.0018. Nobody writes "cadmium's properties" if they can help it. The element just is not giving off person vibes.

The Part That Should Bother You

In the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), Trump scores 6.02. Giuliani scores 7.56. These are higher than the scores for God (0.75) and Satan (0.77).

Read that again. Your brain, as measured by your apostrophe choices, treats Giuliani as more vividly alive than God. God's ratio is 0.75. You write "the will of God" more often than "God's will." Satan comes in at 0.77, barely edging out the Almighty.

The horse Secretariat scored 1.75 in COCA. Donald Duck: 1.00. The Senate: 0.19. Hydrogen: 0.029.

So the ranking goes: politicians, then corporations, then racehorses, then fictional ducks, then governments, then God, then elements. Make of that what you will.

It Has Been Shifting for Centuries

This is not just a snapshot. The 's construction has been gaining ground on "of" for a long time. Researchers tracked the trend through State of the Union messages and the Corpus of Historical American English, and the direction is consistent: 's keeps winning.

The change has not moved evenly through society. Children adopted the animate 's construction first. Women followed. Men last. The rate of change ranks children first, then women, then men. A small, verifiable asymmetry baked into how language shifts through a population.

Why This Matters for Word Games

Your instincts about 's versus "of" are already calibrated to animacy. You probably do not write "the effort of Giuliani" without it feeling slightly off. That is the animacy detector firing. It is the part of your brain that has internalized centuries of pattern-matching between grammar and the aliveness of things.

This is also why "the music of Beethoven" sounds formal and "Beethoven's music" sounds personal. You are toggling the animacy dial. The apostrophe brings things to life. The "of" construction pushes them toward the abstract.

One possibility is that this is the engine behind why certain crossword clues feel warm and others feel cold, or why some possessives in word puzzles look right and others look strange. Your word game instincts are built on animacy doing quiet grammar work underneath everything, and now you know it is there.

Source: Languagelog