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consists. Overshoes, for instance, should be so styled, and not called either rubbers or gums.
rugged, hardy: Rugged in the sense of robust, as in health, is an undesirable Americanism for it means primarily "superficially rough, broken irregularly; as rugged cliffs." Hardy means inured as to toil, exposure, or want.
's: "The sign or suffix of the possessive or genitive case singular and of the same case plural when the noun ends in
n; as, men's lives; children's books; shortened since the 17th century from Middle English
-es. The apostrophe now replaces the
e. Some words ending in a sibilant omit the
s of the possessive to avoid the disagreeable repetition of a hissing sound. The rules formulated for this work are as follow: (1) Singular monosyllabic nouns ending in a sibilant sound (
s,
x,
ce,
se, or dental
ge) add the apostrophe and
s except when the following word begins with a sibilant sound; as,
James's reign;
Jones's hat; a
fox' skin. (2) Singular dissyllabic nouns ending in a sibilant sound add the apostrophe and
s, unless the sibilant is followed by another sibilant or the last syllable is unaccented; as,
Porus' defeat;
Moses' face;
Jesus' disciples;
Laplace's theory;
Hortense's fate. (3) Singular polysyllabic nouns ending in a sibilant sound add the apostrophe and
s only when a principal or
