Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and a question that comes up a lot for me as an editor is whether inanimate nouns should be possessive. For example, can you say “the coffee shop’s ambiance,” or do you have to say “the ambiance of the coffee shop?”
This is a gray area of grammar, and it gets really confusing when you start talking about things that are technically groups of people, like nations, offices, and so on. My best advice is to pay attention to how it sounds. “The coffee shop’s ambiance” sounds right to me, but “the bottle’s lid” seems like it should just be “the bottle lid,” where bottle is an adjective. “The nation’s people” seems like it should be “the people of this nation.”
There is one hard-and-fast rule, however. If the noun is animate, you must always use the apostrophe to make it possessive, never the “of” construction. For example, “the cat’s collar” always sounds better than “the collar of the cat.”
That’s your Grammar Minute! Visit thegrammarminute.com for more tips and tricks.