Question: Following a previous discussion about **I would like** vs **I would have liked**, I have a similar question.

What is the difference between

> 
> I wanted to come to your party but I couldn't 
> 
> 
> I would have liked to come to your party but I couldn't.
> 
> 
>

Answer: 
I've answered essentially the same question over at english.stackexchange.com: [Why is “our today's meeting” wrong?](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/251561/why-is-our-todays-meeting-wrong)

Usually, a noun phrase in English must have exactly one determiner: you can say "I drove this car" or "I drove my car", but not "I drove car" or "I drove this my car".

Certain nouns (such as plural nouns and proper nouns) don't need determiners: "I love bees", "I love milk", "I love Paris", "I love biology". But it's never acceptable for a noun phrase to have more than one determiner (with possible extremely rare exceptions).

"Our last week's meeting" is unacceptable because the noun phrase "meeting" has two determiners, "our" and "last week's". It would also be unacceptable to say "the today's meeting" or "our the meeting".

Here are some phrases which may *seem* to have multiple determiners, but don't actually:

* your father's home - this noun phrase has only one determiner, namely, "your father's". Meanwhile, the phrase "your father" is also a noun phrase which only has one determiner, namely, "your".
* the brass men's wristwatches - the determiner of this noun phrase is "the", and "brass" and "men's" are adjectives.
* an old people's home - the determiner of this noun phrase is "an". The phrase "old people's home" is an idiom which acts as a simple noun, even though it looks like it contains a determiner.
This sounds like one of those rules that someone made up because they could think of examples where breaking it caused problems, but didn't try to think through if breaking it would ALWAYS cause problems.

Well, off the top let me point out that the rule as worded, "never use two possessives in a row", is clearly wrong. People do that all the time and it makes perfect sense. "My dog's bone", "Fred's car's engine", etc. In examples like that, the first possessive modifies the first noun, and then that phrase is used as a possessive to modify the second noun. I mean, in "my dog's bone", I am saying that the dog belongs to me, and that the bone belongs to this dog which belongs to me. Both possessives are not modifying the same word. It is not "my bone" and also some "dog's bone".

But I assume that whoever made up this rule meant that you cannot have two possessives modifying the same noun. You can't say "Fred's Bob's car". That example clearly doesn't make sense. Is it Fred's car, or is it Bob's car? If it belongs to both, you need to join them with an "and", like "Fred's and Bob's car". If you're not sure of the ownership, you need to join them with an "or", like, "The red Chevy is either Fred's or Bob's car".

But possessives are used for many things other than ownership. If I am at work and I refer to "my desk", I probably don't mean that I own the desk, but rather that this is the desk where the company has assigned me to sit while I work. If I say, "my state", I don't mean that I personally own the entire state and everything in it. I simply mean that I live there. Etc.

So if I say "our meeting", I don't mean that I own the meeting. I don't know what that would even mean. I mean the meeting between you and me, or possibly the meeting that you and I organized. If I say "last week's meeting", I mean the meeting that happened last week. There is no reason why a meeting could not be both "our meeting" and "last week's meeting", so "our last week's meeting" is a perfectly sensible thing to say. And indeed people say things like that all the time.

Yes, USUALLY two possessives in a row that both apply to the same noun is wrong. But it's not valid to say that because something is USUALLY wrong that therefore you should NEVER do it.