Should you say I appreciate your coming or I appreciate you coming? That’s the question. Literary folks tend to want your; everybody else tends to want you.

Noun clauses with the verb in the –ing form sometimes have the subject in the possessive case (as in My going home made her sad, or Shareholders worried about the company’s reorganizing) and sometimes don’t (as in Me going home made her sad, or Shareholders worried about the company reorganizing). In his famous 1926 book A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H. W. Fowler suggested that the latter, without a possessive, was “rapidly corrupting modern English style.” He thought that a participle (functioning as a gerund) lacked a proper grammatical relationship to any preceding noun or pronoun that was not in the possessive; it was instead “fused” with it in some sense. The name “fused participle” has stuck.

No reputable grammarian today doubts that Fowler overstated his case in calling fused participles without exception “indefensible.” For example, in The chance of that ever happening is slight, no one would write “that’s ever happening”: The demonstratives this and that never take the possessive suffix.

That’s (ahem — a contraction, not a possessive) not the only kind of sentence in which the possessive is impossible or uncomfortable. I recently put out a Twitter poll for this sentence: I detest the inconvenience caused by my [car/car’s] being with the mechanic. With some 841 votes, the preference was for car (80 percent) over car’s (20 percent).

What I’ve said so far will be unsurprising to grammar aficionados. Let’s delve more into the history.

In the 1926 entry, Fowler wrote that the phrase fused participle had been “invented a dozen years [before] for the purpose of labelling & so making recognizable & avoidable a usage considered by the inventor to be rapidly corrupting English style.” Who was this inventor? Either H. W. himself or his late brother, F. G. Fowler, who died in 1918 from tuberculosis contracted in World War I. The term was first used, it is believed, in The King’s English (second ed., 1908). In that book, the two brothers elaborated why they thought the fused participle “defrauds” both the gerund and the “honest participle.” The argument extends for ten pages.

About the time when Fowler’s 1926 Modern English Usage appeared, the subject gave rise to a skirmish between Fowler and the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, who marshaled voluminous historical evidence to undermine Fowler’s absolute position. Published as a tract for the Society for Pure English, Jespersen’s essay was an aggressive 25 pages with repeated slights of Fowler. Because Fowler had termed the fused participle “grammatically indefensible,” Jespersen called him an “instinctive grammatical moralizer” who had “emotional objections.”

Responding to Jespersen, Fowler bristled: “He . . . laughs at me.” Fowler said the two men simply didn’t “look at problems of idiom and expression from the same point of view.” And he embraced the sobriquet “instinctive grammatical moralizer,” saying: “The ability to distinguish between the right and wrong in speech does seem to me much more a matter of instinct than of history.” Ruffled by the exchange, Fowler largely withdrew as a contributor to the Society.

Most commentators have agreed that Jespersen won the debate as Fowler stubbornly clung to an untenable position. In the end, Fowler opposed the fused participle because he thought it “ugly.”

Fowler’s final word in the debate came in 1930, when Oxford University Press issued the third edition of The King’s English. He kept the relevant passages much as they had been in 1908: “How is it conceivable,” Fowler asked, “that people should leave out the possessive ’s in the reckless way they do?”

He had a good illustration: I dislike my best friend(’s) violating my privacy. “It cannot be a true account of the matter,” he wrote, “to say that friend is the object of I dislike.” Few would quarrel with the example as showing the benefits of the possessive before the gerund-participle, as Fowler knew: “Many of us would be willing to adopt the sentiment conveyed who yet would not admit for a moment that they disliked their best friend even when he intruded; they condemn the sin, but not the sinner.”

Rather than ignore the well-known scuffling with Jespersen, Fowler acknowledged it in a new footnote: “The present (1930) re-setting of the text gives me the opportunity of affirming again my belief in [avoiding fused participles], in spite of the formidable criticism directed against its reality by Professor Jespersen.”

Remember the Twitter poll: I detest the inconvenience caused by my [car/car’s] being with the mechanic. The 80 percent who voted for car would undoubtedly side with Jespersen; the 20 percent who voted for car’s would side with Fowler. Perhaps it all comes down to tribalism. But if we’re to be divided on the question, let us be respectful of the opposition.

Some will insist on prosecuting Fowler for his dogged insistence in the face of historical evidence to the contrary. How could his commitment to the point have been so irrationally intense?

Let me posit a possibility. Recall that in 1926, he had referred vaguely to the inventor of the phrase fused participle. Was this in reference to himself? Perhaps. But it seems more likely that he was defending the memory of his beloved brother Francis, who had died too young — his co-author of The King’s English. He might have known that the phrase fused participle was among Francis’s few legacies to grammatical literature. After all, Modern English Usage was dedicated to Francis, who, in Henry’s words, “had a nimbler wit . . . and a more open mind than his twelve-year-older partner.” That he was shielding his brother is pure conjecture, but it explains Henry’s unshakable attachment. And if the conjecture is true, Fowler’s refusal to soften his position did indeed perpetuate Francis’s legacy — and all of us can surely forgive the pertinacity with which Henry defended it.