Poor Steve Harrelson. He's a state representative from Texarkana, Ark., and he agreed to sponsor a little ol', supposedly innocuous resolution at this year's session of the Arkansas legislature when BAM!

The Honorable from Texarkana found he'd wandered smack dab into the middle of the Great Apostrophe War, which has been going on since there was an apostrophe to war over.

Mr. Harrelson was just trying to do an old family friend a favor, and all punctuation broke loose. The friend is Parker Westbrook, a collector of Arkansiana who's usually in the vicinity when this state's distinctive history, language, politics or culture in general comes into disputed play.

Good ol' Parker long ago took a firm stand in the grammatical war over whether the possessive of this state's name should be spelled Arkansas'or Arkansas's.

Mr. Westbrook favors Arkansas's with the final s.Indeed, he's made it something of a personal crusade. Which explains why he called on Rep. Steve Harrelson to further his cause by proposing that Arkansas's be declared the official possessive of the state's name. Little did Steve Harrelson realize he was walking into a linguistic minefield.

In this statewide civil war over the proper possessive of Arkansas, both sides fire all kinds of citations and references at each other like artillery barrages. The humble little apostrophe, a mere squiggle on the page, seems to set off the fiercest emotions among grammarians.

The Great Apostrophe War has even been known to break out sporadically here at the statewide paper. Last time, it was touched off by a polite letter from The Honorable and eloquent Buzz (formally Morris) Arnold, federal appellate judge, scholar and language maven.

His Honor urged us to tack an s on to the sobriquet that appears just under our name on the front page: Arkansas' Newspaper. I prefer Arkansas's myself, but long ago resigned myself to having lost that fight.

Indeed, I've become almost fond of that grammatical barbarism. Maybe because it's emblematic of this state's gritty determination to go its own way, thank you, no matter what the prevailing fashion. Have you ever had a favorite shirt with a small irregularity in it, or a wobbly table with one leg shorter than the others that's always been in your kitchen? To fix it would be a kind of sacrilege, an offense against tradition. Continued...