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As I understand it, your question about the sentence This is a main difference between the personality of good people and bad people. involves determining whether "the personality of good people …

The plural form of 'attorney general' The plural form of "attorney general" is less settled than fans of Eggs McMuffin might suppose. Here is the treatment of the plural issue in Merriam-Webster's El …

From The New York Time Manual of Style and Usage (1999): possessives. …

I think that the phrase your and your competitors’ relative market performance is a pretty odd fish in the first place—because performance comes out singular here even though the actual subject …

The Cambridge guidelines, though all over the place, at least indicate that significant areas of nonhuman things can be assigned 's possessives. …

One problem with his approach that I haven't noted previously involves how to handle possessives associated with women's proper names. … That is the edition I read when searching for other instances of Dryden's handling of possessives in the play. …

As for your follow-up question about the law of Arrhenius, the same section of The Oxford Style Manual says this: any variation follows the normal rules governing possessives (Charles's law, Descartes's …

Possessives of noun denoting inanimate objects are generally unobjectionable. … But such possessives can be overdone. For example, avoid using the possessive form of a year—e.g.: "Mr. …

A number of Google Books matches contain instances of "the rest's" used as a possessive. Here are some examples. From "The Charter Granted by His Majesty King Charles the Second, to the Colony of Rhod …

T. O. Churchill, A Grammar of the English Language (1823) identifies two somewhat surprising culprits as being responsible for the deplorable rise of the apostropheless its: printers, and English spea …

I looked at a bunch of style guides to see what they have to say on this subject. The vast majority of them dedicate at least a paragraph to the distinction (or nondistinction) between "in behalf of" …

Update (January 7, 2022): Revised guidelines from CMoS The information in my original answer (above) that refers to The Chicago Manual of Style's guidelines for handling possessives of singular proper … [Examples:] Descartes's three dreams, the marquis's mother, Francois's efforts to learn English, Vaucouleurs's assistance to Joan of Arc, Albert Camus's novels 7.18 Possessives of names like "Euripides …

The style-guide dimension Several style guides weigh in on joint possessives and reach essentially the same conclusion. … Joint Possessives. For joint possession, an apostrophe goes with the last element in a series of names. If you put an apostrophe with each element, you signal individual possession. …

This rule governs two of the examples you ask about: the bus' seats (referring to just one bus) and the mattress' springs (referring to just one mattress) But your other two examples involve possessives … of singular common nouns that precede a word starting with s; and one governing possessives of plural common nouns, regardless of the word that follows them. …

Bryan Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage, second edition (2003) offers the following discussion of how to handle possessive proper names ending in -s: POSSESSIVES. A. Singular Possessives. … Here are the relevant subsections of Chicago 16: 7.16 Possessives of proper nouns, letters, and numbers. …