I’m pretty sure the title of this post could be paraphrased as the Mother’s Day of all the mothers that belong to all the mothers out there.

A friend of mine just mentioned Mother’s Day to me through text and I had to pause when writing back because it seemed that any version of mothers/mother’s/mothers’ would make sense when talking about the holiday. This is a topic that John Wells has blogged about at least a few times. He likes to go on tirades against apostrophes, and I think for good reason. They’re often unnecessary when context will due and the phonetic realization of each version is the same. If we can handle this in speech, why not in writing?

Maybe because no one is likely to understand a title like Mothers’ mother’s Mothers Day in speech. If someone actually uttered this phrase, I’m sure their listeners would need to ask for some clarification. In this case, the orthography actually has the option to disambiguate without any clarifying questions. So what if we end up writing things “wrong” because of confusion over apostrophes and polysemy: a purpose is still served.

This reminds me of the debates over Japanese writing that I’ve blogged about before.