The linguistics behind Biden's "garbage" gaffe

A tiny apostrophe may determine the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

During a Zoom call on Tuesday, President Biden appeared to call Trump's supporters "garbage", echoing Hillary Clinton's infamous "basket of deplorables" gaffe from 2016.

Here's what he said. (Transcript below.)

And just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”.
Well, let me tell you something.
The only garbage I see floating out there is his [supporters/supporter’s/supporters’].

There are at least three possible interpretations here:

1. Biden said supporters (plural noun), referring to Trump’s supporters. Now in context this could refer to just Trump’s political allies—a reference to the invited speaker—or to Trump’s entire voter base. This lattermost possibility is how the right-leaning media outlets are interpreting the statement.

2. Biden said supporter’s (singular possessive), with an implied noun. Under this interpretation he was saying, “The only garbage I see out there is his supporter’s garbage.” Presumably what he’d be referring to in this scenario is what he sees as the nonsense the speaker was saying. This interpretation is what the White House is claiming was intended.

3. Neither camp is considering a third possibility: that Biden said supporters’ (plural possessive). This is pretty similar to the second possibility, with an implied noun, and would have meant, “The only garbage I see out there is his supporters’ [plural] garbage.”

Without peering into Biden's own mind, however, it's impossible to know which interpretation was intended, because they're all homophones. Even though all three possibilities are written differently, they're pronounced the same:

Why is English like this?? Why is something as important as grammatical possession so difficult to figure out in the language?

English actually has two ways of indicating grammatical possession:

• of, called the prepositional genitive because it uses a preposition
• ‑’s, called the Saxon genitive because it comes from an Old English noun suffix (more on this in a bit)

The prepositional genitive and the Saxon genitive have two slightly different uses too: The prepositional genitive tends to emphasize the possessor, while the Saxon genitive tends to emphasize the possessed noun:

But the tricky thing about the Saxon genitive is it follows exactly the same pronunciation rules as the plural -s suffix:

This is because both the Saxon genitive and the plural suffix come from Old English noun suffixes. Many Old English nouns had a suffix ‑es that indicated possession, and a different suffix ‑as for plurals.

Eventually, both of those suffixes lost their vowel, and when this happened English writers just wrote ⟨s⟩ for the plural. But for the genitive suffix, writers adopted a convention that was already common in French at the time of writing silent ⟨e⟩'s with an apostrophe. As a result, even though both forms descend from noun suffixes, one is written with an apostrophe and the other isn’t.

And that’s why today supporters, supporter’s, and supporters’ all sound the same but are written differently, leaving Biden’s statement wide open for interpretation and controversy.

📖 Recommended Reading

• Going nucular: Language, politics, and culture in confrontational times (Geoffrey Nunberg, 2004)
• The stories of English (David Crystal, 2004)